m 


University  of 
Massachusetts 


UMAS&  Amherst 

I      B      R      A      R 


DIGHTON  ROCK 
A  Study  of  the  Written  Rocks  of  New  England 


DIGHTON  ROCK 

A  Study  of  the  Written  Rocks  of  New  England 


By 

EDMUND  BURKE  DELABARRE 

Professor  of  Psychology  in  Brown  University 


With  108  Illustrations,  from  Rare 
Prints,  Photographs,  Drawings,  Charts,  and  Maps 


m 
m 


New  York 

WALTER  NEALE 

Publisher  of  General  Literature 

1928 


7-1 


:fl33 


Copyright,  1928,  By 
Edmund  Burke  Delabarre 


Manufactured  in  the  United  States  of  America 


To  the  Memory 

of 

Miguel  Cortereal 

First  European  Dweller  in  New  England 

and  of 

Great  Meta comet 

Commonly  Known  As  King  Philip 

Chief  Sachem 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface   1 

CHAPTER 

I.     Introduction       8 

II,    The  Dighton  Writing  Rock 17 

III.  Early  Interest  in  Dighton  Rock 28 

IV.  A  Record  of  Phcenician  Adventure   ....  49 
V.     Continued  Oriental  Speculation 68 

VI.    The  Norse  Myth 86 

VII.     Development  of  the  Indian  Theory  ....  108 

VIII.     A  Medley  of  Recent  Opinions 126 

IX.     Reproductions  of  the  Dighton  Rocjc  Inscrip- 
tion        146 

X.     A  New  Interpretation  of  the  Records  .     .     .  165 

XI.    The  Mount  Hope  Rock 187 

XII.     The  Island  of  Rhode  Island 205 

XIII.  The  Written  Rocks  at  Tiverton 226 

XIV.  Mark  Rock  in  Warwick 237 

XV.     Miscellaneous  Inscribed  Rocks  and  Stones    .  255 

XVI.    Frauds,  Rumors  and  Mistaken  Reports  .    .    .  271 

XVII.     Psychological  Observations       287 

XVIII.     Conclusions 302 

Bibliographies 313 

A.  Bibliography  of  Dighton  Rock 317 

B.  Chronological  Sequence  of  Items  in  A     .     .  346 

C.  Partial  Bibliography  of  New  England  Petro- 

glyphs 348 

Index 353 

vii 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

Note. — Acknowledgment  for  the  loan  of  plates  is  made  in  this  list  by  means 

of  the  following  abbreviations :  to  the  Colonial  Society  of   Massachusetts, 

(C.S.M.)  ;  to  the  Society  for  the  Preservation  of  New  England  Antiquities, 

(N.E.A.)  ;  to  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society,    (R.I.H.S.). 

1.  Dighton  Rock  at  low  tide.     Photograph  by  E.  B.  Delabarre, 

September    12,    1927 frontispiece 

FACING   PAGE 

2.  Shoreward  side  of  Dighton  Rock,  with  Grassy  Island  beyond. 

Photograph  by  E.  B.  Delabarre,  May  9,  1925 10 

3.  Sketch  Map  of  Assonet  Neck,  Berkley,  Massachusetts       .     .  18 

4.  The  up-stream  end  of  Dighton  Rock.     Photograph  by  E.  B. 

Delabarre,    1919 22 

5.  A  flashlight  view  of  the  Dighton  Rock  inscriptions.     Photo- 

graph by  E.  B.  Delabarre,  June  25,  1923,  11 :30  P.  M.      .    .  22 

BETWEEN    PAGES 

6.  Best  known  drawings  of  Dighton  Rock  made  before  the  in- 

troduction of  photography.  From  the  Tenth  Annual  Report 
of  the  Bureau  of  American  Ethnology,  1893,  Plate  LIV 
(C.S.M.) 26-27 

7.  Earliest  drawing  and  description  of  the  Dighton  Rock  inscrip- 

tion, by  Rev.  John  Danforth,  October,  1680.  From  a  photo- 
graph of  the  originals  in  the  British  Museum,  Additional 
Manuscripts   4432,    187,    188    (C.S.M.) 30-31 

FACING   PAGE 

8.  Earliest  printed  drawing  and  description  of  Dighton  Rock. 

From  the  Wonderful   Works   of   God   Commemorated,  by 

Rev.  Cotton  Mather,  D.D.,  1690  (N.E.A.)       38 

9.  Drawing   of   the   Dighton   Rock   inscription   by    Rev.    Ezra 

Stiles,  July  15,  1767.  From  the  original  in  the  Yale  Univer- 
sity  Library    (N.E.A.)       48 

10.  The  "Smith-Stiles"  copy  of  a  drawing  made  in  1789  by  Wil- 
liam Baylies,  John  Smith,  Samuel  West,  Joseph  Gooding, 
and  others.  From  the  original  in  the  library  of  the  Massa- 
chusetts Historical  Society     (N.E.A.) 48 

ix 


X  LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING   PAGE 

11.  Samuel  Harris's  copy,  about  1807,  of  the  alphabetic  charac- 

ters discernible  in  James  Winthrop's  full  size  ink-impression 
from  Dighton  Rock,  1788.  From  the  original  in  the  Har- 
vard University   Library      (C.S.M.) 60 

12.  E.  A.  Kendall's  Painting  in  Oil,  1807     (C.S.M.) 70 

13.  Dammartin's     reproduction     of     Gebelin's     reproduction     of 

Sewall's  drawing  of  1768.  From  Dammartin's  Explica- 
tion de  la  pierre  de  Taunston,  1838,  planche  1 90 

14.  The  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society's  drawing,  1834.     From 

a  photograph  of  the  original  in  the  Royal  Library,  Copen- 
hagen     (N.KA.) 90 

15.  Drawing  of  alleged  Roman  letters  (Fig.  E),  1847;  and  com- 

bination of  the  drawings  of  1789  and  1837,  by  Henry  R. 
Schoolcraft,  1851.  From  Schoolcraft's  History  of  the 
Indian  Tribes,  volume  I,  1851,  Plate  36     (C.S.M.)  ....  110 

16.  The  earliest  known  photographic  representation  of   Dighton 

Rock.  Daguerreotype  made  in  1853  by  Capt.  Seth  Eastman. 
From  the  original  in  the  library  of  the  Historical  Society 
of    Pennsylvania      (N.E.A.)        130 

PAGE 

17.  Drawing  of  the  shoreward  side  of  Dighton  Rock,  by  Charles 

A.  Fernald,  1903.  From  Fernald's  Universal  International 
Genealogy,  1910,  page  33,  Plate  70     (C.S.M.) 137 

18.  Drawing   by   John   W.   Barber,    1839.     From   Barber's    His- 

torical Collections  of  Massachusetts,  page  117     (C.S.M.)  .  151 

FACING   PAGE 

19.  Plaster  Cast  by  Lucien  I.  Blake,  1876.     From  a  photograph 

in  the  manuscript  catalogue  of  the  Gilbert  Museum,  Am- 
herst   College      (C.S.M.)        140 

20.  21,  22.     Examples  of  photographs  interpreting  the  inscription 

on  Dighton  Rock  by  chalking  its  supposed  characters : 

20.  By    A.    M.    Harrison    and    W.    B.    Gardner,    in    1875 

(N.E.A.) 

21.  By  Frank  S.  Davis  in  1894     (N.E.A.) 

22.  By  the  Old  Colony  Historical  Society  in  1902    (N.E.A.)  150 

23.  Photograph  of  Dighton  Rock  without  chalking,  by  George  C. 

Burgess  and  Augustine  H.  Folsom,  1868     (N.E.A.)  ...  156 

24.  Photograph  of  Dighton  Rock  without  chalking,  by  Qiarles 

A.  Hathaway,  Jr.,  1907     (N.E.A.) 156 

25.  Flashlight    photograph   of    Dighton    Rock,    by    E.    B.    Dela- 

barre,  July  17,  1920,  at  3.00  A.  M 162 

26.  Arrangement  of  apparatus  for  taking  flashlight  photographs 

(N.E.A.)        164 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS  xi 

BETWEEN   PAGES 

n.  The  "Cortereal"  inscription  on  Dighton  Rock;  its  appearance 
in  seven  different  photographs,  and  its  probably  correct 
reading        168-169 

28.  The  right-hand  end  of  the  inscribed  surface     (N.E.A.) 

FACING   PAGE 

a.  Section  of  flashhght  photograph  of  July  17,  1920 

b.  Probable  inscription  by  Miguel  Cortereal,  1511 

c.  Indian    glyphs    overlying    and    obscuring    the    Cortereal 

inscription 172 

29.  The  Coat-of-Anns  of  Portugal 

a.  As  adopted   in   1485.     From   the   Geographical  Journal, 

1900,  xvi.  634 

b.  As  depicted  on  the   Cantino  chart,   1502.     From  Henry 

Harrisse's  Discovery  of  North  America,  Plate  VI,  pages 
78-79 

c.  As  inscribed  on  Dighton  Rock 164 

30.  A  spring  near  Dighton   Rock,  possibly  the   "White  Spring" 

of    tradition.      Photograph    by    E.    B.    Delabarre,    Novem- 
ber 11,   1923 176 

31.  The  mouth  of  "White  Man's  Brook,"  and  beginning  of  the 

"Injun  Trail."     Photograph  by  E.  B.  Delabarre,     April  4, 

1924        176 

Z2.  The  "Thacher"  writing  on  Dighton  Rock,  1592 

a.  Section  of  flashlight  photograph  of  July  17,  1920 

b.  The  same  with  the  "Thacher"  reading  emphasized  •        .  180 

ZZ.  Part  of  the  left-hand  end  of  the  inscribed  surface   (N.E.A) 

a.  Section  of  flashlight  photograph  of  June  27,  1922 

b.  The  same  with  pictographs  and  records  emphasized    .    .  182 

34.  Conjectural  completion  of  the  "Spring"  inscription 

a.  Section  of  flashlight  photograph  of  July  17,  1920 

b.  The  same  with  the  writing  emphasized 184 

35.  Conjectural  reconstruction  of  all  of  the  inscriptions  on  Digh- 

ton Rock,  by  E.  B.  Delabarre,  1927.    Plotted  upon  the  flash- 
light photograph  of  July  17,  1920 186 

Zd.  Section   of    Chart   of    Narragansett   Bay    in   the   vicinity   of 

Mount  Hope,  Bristol,  Rhode  Island 188 

Z1.  The  Mount  Hope  Rock  as  seen  from  the  northwest.  Photo- 
graph by  John  R.  Hess,  November  16,  1919 190 

38.  The  inscription  on  Mount  Hope  Rock.     Photograph  by  Johii 

R.   Hess,   November   16,   1919       190 


xii  LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

tAGE 

39.  Drawing  of   Mount  Hope  inscription  by  William  J.  Miller, 

1880.      From    Miller's    Notes    ConcerniHg   the   Wampanoag 

Tribe,  page  119 189 

40.  Drawing  of  Mount  Hope  inscription  by  Wilfred  H.  Munro, 

1880.    From  Munro's  History  of  Bristol,  page  389  ...     .  189 

41.  Drawing  of    Mount   Hope   inscription  by   Edgar   M.   Bacon, 

1904.    From  Bacon's  Narragansett  Bay,  page  3 189 

42.  Versions  of  the  Mount  Hope  inscription  and  comparison  with 

other   Indian  writings 198 

43.  Drawings  of  Portsmouth  inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  June  17, 

1767.     From  Stiles's  manuscript  Itineraries,  ii.  265  ....  204 

44.  Drawings  of  Portsmouth  inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  June  17, 

1767.     From  his  Itineraries,  ii.  266 207 

45.  Map  by  Ezra  Stiles,  October  6,  1767,  of  the  vicinity  of  the 

Portsmouth  rocks.     From  his   Itineraries,  ii.  301   ....  208 

46.  Plan  of  the  Portsmouth  rocks,  by   Ezra   Stiles,   October   6, 

1767.     From  his   Itineraries,   ii.   302 209 

47.  Drawings  of   Portsmouth  inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  Octo- 

ber 6,  1767.     From  his  Itineraries,  ii.  303 210 

48.  Drawings  of  Portsmouth  inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  Octo- 

ber 6,  1767.     From  his  Itineraries,  ii.  304 211 

49.  Drawings  of  Portsmouth  inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  Octo- 

ber 6,  1767.     From  his  Itineraries,  ii.  305 212 

FACING   PAGE 

50.  Section   of    Chart   of    Narragansett   Bay,   in   the  vicinity   of 

the  former   Portsmouth  rocks 206 

51.  52,    53.  Drawings    of    Portsmouth    inscriptions    by   John    R. 

Bartlett,  August  10,  1835.    From  the  originals  in  the  library 
of  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society 

Number  1  .     .    .  206 

Numbers  2  and  3  212 

54.  One   of   the  inscribed   rocks   at    Portsmouth,    Rhode    Island. 

Photograph  by  George  H.  Chase,   1883 214 

55.  Section   of    Chart  of    Narragansett   Bay,   in   the  vicinity   of 

Arnold's    Point,    Portsmouth        216 

56.  The  Arnold's  Point  Cup  Stone.     Photograph  by  E.  B.  Dela- 

.  barre.    May    5,    1920       216 

57.  Section  of  Chart  of  Narragansett  Bay,  showing  portions  of 

Portsmouth  and  Tiverton  in  the  vicinity  of  Fogland  Point  220 

58.  Section   of    Chart   of    Narragansett   Bay,   showing   southerly 

part   of    Middletown       220 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS  xiii 

FACING    PAGE 

59.  The  basins  and  grooves  on  ledges  near  Purgatory.     Photo- 

graphs by  E.  B.  Delabarre,  August  23,  1921 222 

60.  The  group   of   Tiverton   boulders   as    seen    from   the   south. 

Photograph  by  John  R.  Hess,  October  29,  1919 226 

61.  The    Tiverton    inscription.      Photograph    by    John    R.    Hess, 

October  29,  1919,  at  5.00  P.  M 226 

62.  63.  Drawings  of  Tiverton  inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  June 

7,  1768.    From  Stiles's  manuscript  Itineraries,  ii.  351,  352     .  228 

PAGES 

64,  65,  66.  Drawings  of  Tiverton  inscriptions  by  John  R.  Bart- 
lett,  August  18,  1835.  From  the  originals  in  the  library  of 
the  Rhode   Island   Historical   Society 230, 231 

PAGE 

67.  Alleged  Runic  characters  on  Portsmouth  and  Tiverton  rocks  234 

68.  Map  of  vicinity  of  Mark  Rock  in  Warwick,  Rhode  Island. 

From  Richard's  Standard  Atlas  of  the  Providence  Metro- 
politan District,  1917,  ii.  26 238 

FACING   PAGE 

69.  The  Mark  Rock  Ledge.    Photograph  by  John  R.  Hess,  May 

19,    1920 240 

70.  Plan  of  Mark  Rock  Ledge.    After  an  aeroplane  photograph 

PAGE 

by  E.  B.  Delabarre,  May  28,  1920 '  .     .  241 

71.  12,  IZ.  Mark  Rock  glyphs  o,  h,  and  c.    Photographs  by  John 

FACING   PAGE 

R.  Hess,  June  1,  1920 242 

74,  75.  Mark  Rock  glyphs  d  and  e.     Photographs  by  John  R. 

Hess,  June  1,   1920 244 

PAGE 

76.  Sketch  of  probable  markings  in  position  / 245 

FACING   PAGE 

n,  78.  Mark  Rock  glyphs  g  and  h.     Photographs  by  John  R. 

Hess,  June  1,  1920 246 

79,  80,  81,  82.  Mark  Rock  glyphs  fZ  and  i.    Photographs  by  E.  B. 

Delabarre,   May  30,    1923 248 

83.  Mark  Rock  glyphs   in  position  %.     Photograph  by  John   R. 

Hess,   June    1,    1920       250 

84.  Probable  appearance  of  drawings  of  human  figures  on  Mark 

Rock 250 

85.  86.  Mark  Rock  glyphs  ;  and  k.     Photographs  by  John  R. 

Hess,  June  1  and  May  29,  1920 252 


xlv  LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

87.  Marks    or    signatures    of    four    Indian    sachems :    Weshagan- 

esett,    Wonimenatony,    Miantonomi,    and     Socononoco 

(R.I.H.S.) 251 

FACING   PAGE 

88.  Inscribed    Indian    Banner    Stone    found    in    Warren,    Rhode 

Island,  near  the  Kickamuit  river.  From  photographs  of 
the  original  in  the  Museum  of  the  American  Indian,  Heye 
Foundation,  New  York .  256 

89.  A  pictographic  headstone   found  in   Dighton,   Massachusetts. 

Photograph  by  Fred  J.  Carr,  from  the  original  in  the 
Museum  of  the  Old  Colony  Historical  Society 258 

90.  Indian  inscription  carved  upon  a  small  boulder  found  in  West 

Wrentham,  Massachusetts.  From  H.  H.  Wilder's  Man's 
Prehistoric  Past,  1923,  page  372 258 

91.  The  Denison  Tablet,  found  in  southerly  Rhode  Island.    From 

a  photograph  of  the  original  in  the  Museum  of  the  Rhode 

Island    Historical    Society       260 

92.  93.  Inscribed  tablet    found   at    Orient,    Long    Island.      From 

dravk^ings  of  the  original  in  the  Museum  of  the  American 

Indian,  Heye  Foundation,  New  York 260 

PAGE 

94.  Inscriptions  on  a  rock  near  Scaticook,  in  Kent,  Connecticut. 

After   drawings   by   Ezra    Stiles,   October   7,    1789,   in   the 

library  of  the  American  Academy  of  Arts  and  Sciences  .     .  262 

95,  96,  97,  98.  Inscription  Rocks  in  Vermont.     From  Hall's  His- 

tory of  Eastern  Vermont,  1858,  pages  587-589 

95.  "Indian  Rock"  at  West  River,  Brattleboro 

96.  Former  location  of  pictured  rocks  at  Bellows  Falls 

97.  98.  Inscriptions  at  Bellows  Falls 266 

FACING   PAGE 

99.  Drawing  by  A.  C.  Hamlin  of  inscriptions  at  Bellows  Falls. 
From  Schoolcraft's  History  of  the  Indian  Tribes,  1860, 
vi.    606      .    .     . 266 

100.  Photograph  of   inscriptions   at   Bellows   Falls.     From   Cata- 

logue of  the  Gilbert  Museum,  Amherst  College,  Plate  XI    .  266 

PAGE 

101.  Inscriptions    at    Machias,    Maine.      From    Alallery's    Picture 

Writing  of  the  American  Indians,  Tenth  Annual  Report  of 

the  Bureau  of  American  Ethnology,  Plate  XII 268 

102.  103.  Drawings  of  the  Hammond  Tablet,  based  on  rubbings 

102.  The  "mammoth"  side 276 

103.  The   "historical"   side       277 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS  xv 

FACING   PAGE 

104.  The  Ober  Broadside,  1889.    From  a  copy  in  the  library  of  the 

Old  Colony  Historical  Society 280 

PAGE 

105.  Alleged  inscription  at  Damaris  Cove  Island,   Maine.     From 

Fernald's    Universal    International    Genealogy,    1910,    page 

398 283 

FACING   PAGE 

106.  Photograph  of  one  side  of  the  Hammond  Tablet.    Photograph 

by  Fred  J.  Carr 284 

107.  Alleged  inscription  at  Monhegan  Island,  Maine.     Drawing  by 

A.   C.   Hamlin,   from   Schoolcraft's   History  of   the   Indian 

Tribes,  1860,  vi.  612 284 

108.  Map  showing  approximate  locations  of  inscribed  rocks  and 

stones  of  the  Narragansett  Basin 302 


PREFACE 

Several  circumstances  have  conspired  to  bring  it  about  that 
this  study  has  been  made  by  one  who  is  a  psychologist  by  pro- 
fession, and  not  a  trained  archaeologist.  For  one  thing,  the 
archaeologists  themselves  were  busy  with  other  interests  and 
assumed  that  this  matter  had  been  sufficiently  settled.  They 
were  mistaken,  as  it  turned  out;  nevertheless,  none  of  them 
seemed  likely  to  make  the  much  needed  investigation.  It  hap- 
pened— ^Voluntate  Dei,  as  one  of  the  rock-records  expresses  it 
— that  it  was  the  psychologist  who  chanced  to  make  his  sum- 
mer home  within  a  mile  or  two  of  the  most  famous  of  these 
rocks,  with  the  consequent  arousal  of  his  curiosity  concerning 
the  unsolved  mystery  of  it.  The  endeavor  to  satisfy  this 
curiosity  followed  naturally,  and  this  led  gradually  to  the  dis- 
covery of  so  much  of  unsupported  statement  that  called  for 
assured  verification  or  refutal,  so  much  of  positive  error,  so 
great  a  variety  of  conflicting  claims  and  so  deep  an  interest  in 
the  pursuit  of  them,  that  he  was  enticed  little  by  little  to  the 
ultimate  assemblage  of  all  facts  and  views  that  had  found 
expression.  Among  these  were  included  a  great  many  that 
were  new  and  important,  and  it  became  his  evident  duty  to  pro- 
vide a  correct  account  of  them  all.  Moreover,  the  inadequacies 
of  previous  investigations  as  well  as  previous  historical  ac- 
counts became  apparent,  and  thus  arose  the  necessity  of  making 
fresh  and  more  thoroughly  conducted  observations  of  his  own. 
Then,  finally,  in  doing  all  this,  he  was  able  to  justify  to  him- 
self the  time  spent  in  the  research  and  thus  to  appease  his  pro- 
fessional conscience,  by  finding  the  subject  full  of  psychological 
contacts,  some  of  which  will  become  evident  in  the  following 
pages. 

Almost  everything  which  appears  in  this  book  has  been 
published  before  in  a  more  extended  form.  Soon  after  the 
first  set  of  new  discoveries  had  thrown  fresh  light  upon  the 

1 


2  DIGHTON  ROCK 

earliest  history  of  Dighton  Rock,  the  Colonial  Society  of 
Massachusetts  requested  that  they  be  presented  in  the  pages  of 
its  Publications.  Later,  it  extended  the  courtesy  of  an  oppor- 
tunity to  complete  the  history  of  the  same  rock  in  the  fullest 
possible  detail.  After  continued  study  of  the  rock  had  given 
new  insight  into  the  probable  nature  of  its  inscriptions,  the 
Society  for  the  Preservation  of  New  England  Antiquities  per- 
mitted the  announcement  of  the  result  in  its  Old-Time  New 
England.  Meanwhile,  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society 
invited  the  writer  to  study  and  describe  all  of  the  other 
inscribed  rocks  about  Narragansett  Bay,  for  publication  in  its 
Collections.  As  preserved  in  these  publications,  however,  the 
papers  are  too  numerous  and  scattered,  and  are  too  full  of 
minute  detail,  to  serve  the  needs  of  the  majority  of  readers. 
They  can  still  be  recommended  to  anyone  who  may  wish  the 
full  proof  or  the  ultimate  source  of  any  statement,  or  who  may 
become  interested  enough  to  wish  to  read  the  more  ample 
presentation  of  the  facts  about  these  rocks.  It  has  seemed 
worth  while,  however,  to  bring  together  the  more  important 
features  of  the  study  in  one  volume  and  in  a  more  compact 
manner,  in  the  hope  that  it  may  thus  reach  a  wider  circle  of 
readers,  and  perhaps  arouse  their  interest  in  a  subject  which 
possesses  so  many-sided  an  appeal  and  whose  study  has  been 
so  continuous  a  source  of  delight  to  the  writer.  This  new 
presentation  is  not  merely  a  briefer  repetition  of  what  is  con- 
tained in  the  early  writings.  Much  of  it  has  been  revised 
radically,  and  frequently  new  facts  are  given  and  new  con- 
clusions drawn.  Foot  notes  are  limited  usually  to  such  added 
material,  since  the  earlier  publications,  and  the  Bibliographies 
at  the  end  of  this  volume,  contain  ample  reference  to  authori- 
ties and  sources. 

The  amount  of  neglected  historical  material  that  has  come 
to  light,  the  number  of  new  facts  that  it  has  been  possible  to 
discover  in  a  field  apparently  already  worn  threadbare  by  over 
two  centuries  of  active  controversy,  is  truly  surprising.  For 
instance,  why  should  it  have  been  assumed  so  long  that  these 
rocks  were  a  mystery  to  the  Indians  at  the  time  of  the  earliest 


PREFACE  3 

colonists,  when  in  truth  it  is  impossible  to  trace  any  reference 
to  them  until  sixty  years  after  the  settlement  of  Plymouth? 
Why  has  no  one  previously  established  the  identity  of  the  Dan- 
f orth  who  was  the  first  to  draw  attention  to  them  ?  Who  would 
have  suspected  that  the  famous  drawing  sent  by  Cotton  Mather 
to  the  Royal  Society,  which  started  the  whole  train  of  weird 
speculations,  was  in  part  a  copy  from  Dan  forth,  and  in  part 
published  upside-down?  Why  has  no  one  told  of  the  visits  to 
Dighton  Rock  of  men  so  eminent  as  Smibert  and  Berkeley,  or 
reproduced  the  valuable  studies  by  President  Stiles,  or  described 
and  pictured  the  important  inscriptions  on  Mark  Rock?  On 
the  side  of  interpretation,  it  has  been  possible  to  develop  a  new 
view  concerning  the  practice  of  picture-writing  by  Indians  in 
New  England;  to  discover  the  probable  date  and  source  and 
to  decipher  the  meaning  of  the  record  on  the  boulder  near 
Mount  Hope ;  to  suggest  the  first  well-supported  reading  of  the 
inscriptions  on  Dighton  Rock,  which,  if  correct,  establishes  the 
main  features  of  its  entire  history  in  a  definite  and  reasonable 
manner.  These  are  examples  of  contributions  such  as  appear 
in  almost  every  chapter.  They  illustrate  how  generously  new 
truths  disclose  themselves  to  one  who  does  no  more  than  make 
himself  receptive  by  adopting  the  attitude  of  an  absorbing 
interest  in  the  subject,  of  a  determination  to  pursue  every  state- 
ment to  its  original  source  and  every  clue  to  its  ultimate 
attainable  end,  and  of  making  new  observations  in  as  thorough 
and  reliable  a  manner  as  lies  within  his  resources. 

The  writer  does  not  overestimate  the  importance  of  his 
contributions,  nor  feel  that  any  particular  credit  is  due  to  him 
personally  for  having  made  them.  The  nearness  of  his  sum- 
mer residence,  his  love  for  out-of-door  activities  with  a  definite 
object  in  view,  his  long  summer  vacations,  gave  him  an  oppor- 
tunity and  a  temptation  far  beyond  those  which  any  previous 
investigator  had  experienced.  Disclosures  of  new  truth  were 
inevitable  under  such  conditions.  The  Story  of  the  Rock 
simply  found  a  receptive  and  impersonally  attuned  vehicle  for 
its  expression  and  gradually  unfolded  itself  through  it.  In 
presenting  the  results,  the  writer  has  endeavored  to  make  the 
record  something  more  than  a  mere  relation  of  events  and 


4  DIGHTON  ROCK 

facts  in  their  bare  cold  order.  For  him,  they  have  woven 
themselves  into  an  organic  body  and  dramatic  movement  glow- 
ing throughout  with  life  and  purpose.  So  far  as  his  powers 
permit,  he  has  tried  to  convey  a  similar  impression  to  his 
readers.  As  he  once  before  expressed  it :  "A  dead  rock,  if 
exhaustively  studied,  is  not  a  dead  rock  merely,  but  the  incarna- 
tion of  a  living,  struggling,  growing,  self -perfecting  Idea;  and 
of  such  is  the  Kingdom  of  Truth." 

The  recent  zeal  and  superficiality  of  reporters  have  been 
responsible  for  many  misleading  descriptions  of  some  of  the 
features  of  these  studies.  Their  blunders  are  often  both 
amusing  and  vexing.  By  calling  attention  to  a  few  of  them, 
the  writer  finds  opportunity  to  relieve  such  slight  irritation 
as  they  may  have  caused  him,  and  to  take  precaution  against 
their  persistence.  Moreover,  it  is  always  profitable  to  know 
the  pitfalls  of  error  that  should  be  avoided,  as  well  as  facts 
that  are  to  be  accepted.  One  of  the  most  extraordinary 
examples  was  perpetrated  by  a  Denver  newspaper.  Learning 
that  the  writer  had  dug  out  some  human  bones  at  Grassy  Island, 
near  Dighton  Rock,  whose  position  and  condition  indicate  that 
they  are  those  of  a  native  Indian  cremated  there  more  than  a 
thousand  years  ago,  it  announced  in  headlines  that  "Bones 
Unearthed  Prove  Discovery  of  America  in  927."  Statements 
that  the  study  of  these  inscriptions  involved  thirteen  years 
of  constant  labor  and  the  reading  of  six  hundred  books  have 
received  world-wide  circulation.  The  research  was  begun,  it 
is  true,  thirteen  years  ago.  But  it  has  been  largely  a  summer- 
time occupation,  and  the  most  important  of  its  results  had  been 
announced  within  five  years.  The  six  hundred  books  are  a 
myth,  based  upon  the  fact  that,  to  illustrate  the  intensity  and 
continuity  of  interest  in  Dighton  Rock,  a  Bibliography  was 
compiled  embracing  over  six  hundred  items  that  refer  to  it. 
Only  a  few  of  these  were  books,  some  of  them  important  con- 
tributions in  periodicals,  a  great  many  merely  brief  and  trivial 
references  to  the  rock.  Some  accounts  made  patently  absurd 
statements,  such  as  that  it  had  taken  thirteen  years  and  required 
the  reading  of  six  hundred  books  to  discover  that  the  Cor- 


PREFACE  5 

tereals  were  early  explorers  of  America — a  fact  known  by 
every  schoolboy,  as  one  London  editor  remarked.  Others 
thought  that  the  labor  was  all  devoted  to  the  attempt  to  trans- 
late an  abbreviated  Latin  inscription, — "which  just  goes  to 
show  what  a  college  education  can  do,"  according  to  a  humorous 
weekly.  Or  the  tale  is  varied  by  asserting  that  the  sole 
result  of  all  these  years  and  readings  was  the  deciphering  of 
eight  words.  In  truth,  the  work  has  had  two  separate  phases. 
The  first  task  that  allured  was  the  correct  presentation  of  the 
historical  facts  concerning  the  long-continued  discussions  that 
had  centered  about  these  inscriptions.  For  this  purpose  it  was 
essential  to  read  everything,  both  published  and  in  unpublished 
records,  that  could  be  found  bearing  upon  the  subject, — and 
this  is  where  the  six  hundred  items  have  their  place.  It  was 
only  later  that  ambition  was  aroused  to  reconstruct  the  faint 
and  uncertain  inscriptions  themselves.  No  reading  of  books 
was  helpful  here,  but  only  prolonged  and  patient  examination 
of  the  rocks  themselves  and  of  photographs  of  them.  Not 
thirteen  years,  but  occasional  periods  of  study  through  a  much 
shorter  time,  were  devoted  to  this ;  and  the  result  was  the  dis- 
covery, not  of  eight  words  merely,  but  of  more  than  twenty 
in  English,  Latin  and  Wampanoag,  written  on  two  rocks,  and 
of  numerous  previously  unseen  Indian  drawings.  One  ac- 
count proclaimed  that  the  extensive  reading  was  a  hindrance 
to  the  accomplishment  of  this  latter  task;  but  that  was  only 
an  example  of  reportorial  imagination.  Still  another  recent 
review  managed  to  incorporate  four  blunders  in  brief  space : 
that  the  rock-writings  are  attributed  by  many  to  the  Indians 
of  500  years  ago;  that  the  Vikings  have  been  strongly 
advocated  recently  as  their  originators ;  that  the  old  stone  mill 
at  Newport  is  accredited  to  the  Vikings ;  and — most  lamentable 
of  all — that  "investigators  now  set  forth  the  claim  that  perhaps 
it  was  the  body  of  Miguel  Cortereal  which  was  found  in  Fall 
River  encased  in  armor!"  It  is  unfortunate  that  misconcep- 
tions like  these  so  easily  arise  and  so  long  persist.  It  is  the 
Indians  of  Colonial  times,  300  years  ago  and  less,  who  enter 
seriously  into  the  discussion ;  the  Norse  theory  of  the  rock  and 


6  DIGHTON  ROCK 

mill  was  abandoned  half  a  century  ago  by  all  who  know  any- 
thing about  the  facts ;  and  no  real  investigator  has  advanced,  or 
ever  will,  so  silly  a  supposition  about  the  skeleton. 

Acknowledgment  is  due  to  the  three  Societies  which  have 
been  mentioned,  for  generous  permission  to  use  in  this  volume 
plates  and  material  that  have  appeared  already  in  their  publi- 
cations. To  the  many  persons  whose  invaluable  help  has  en- 
riched the  results  of  his  labors,  the  writer  is  under  deep  obli- 
gation. Already,  in  the  earlier  papers,  he  has  expressed  his 
appreciation  of  such  service  in  case  of  particular  facts  sup- 
plied or  useful  hints  given  toward  their  discovery.  He  per- 
mits himself  now,  however,  the  pleasure  of  making  known 
the  sincerity  of  his  gratitude  to  those  who,  apart  from  any 
particular  contributions,  have  given  constant  encouragement 
and  inspiration  by  their  sympathetic  interest  and  friendly 
counsel.  Among  these  must  be  named  James  Edward  Seaver, 
late  Secretary  of  the  Old  Colony  Historical  Society,  whose 
kindly  help  was  indispensable  in  the  early  stages  of  the  enquiry; 
Worthington  Ford  and  Julius  H.  Tuttle,  generous  guides  in 
the  adventure  of  research ;  George  Parker  Winship,  close  friend 
and  steadying  critic;  Harris  Hawthorne  Wilder,  the  eternal 
youthfulness  of  whose  enthusiasm,  a  prized  influence  enduring 
since  days  of  youthful  companionship,  has  been  the  stay  of 
moments  of  discouragement;  Howard  M.  Chapin,  through 
whose  wise  suggestion  the  study  was  broadened  beyond  the 
compass  of  a  single  rock  to  embrace  the  entire  related  region; 
Albert  Matthews,  the  unprobed  depths  of  whose  fund  of  elusive 
information  has  solved  many  a  knotty  problem,  and  whose 
tireless  skill  in  the  editorial  art  has  raised  the  product  to  a 
higher  plane;  George  Lyman  Kittredge,  who  made  firm  the 
conviction  of  the  real  importance  of  these  researches,  con- 
tributed much  out  of  his  own  deep  lore,  supplied  a  high  ideal 
of  scholarly  method,  and  gave  many  an  effective  spur  to  con- 
tinued endeavor;  and  most  of  all,  Dorothea  Cotton  Delabarre, 
my  beloved  wife,  whose  patient  endurance  of  endless  attempts 
to  formulate  problems  and  to  give  adequate  expression  to 
results  has  been  a  treasured  stimulus  to  thought,  and  who  has 


PREFACE  7 

often  suggested  possibilities  whose  further  elaboration  has 
been  incorporated  into  essential  features  of  the  completed 
structure. 

9  Arlington  Avenue, 

Providence,  Rhode  Island. 

September  1,  1927. 


CHAPTER  I 

INTRODUCTION 

There  is  an  irresistible  fascination  in  the  study  of  the  past. 
It  gives  glimpses  of  the  process  whereby  cosmic  systems  have 
come  into  being,  whereby  life  has  arisen  and  has  developed  into 
successively  higher  forms,  whereby  man  has  advanced  slowly, 
with  unceasing  struggle,  from  a  level  near  to  that  of  the  brutes 
up  to  his  present  imperfect  civilization.  Surveyed  in  its  whole- 
ness, it  is  a  revelation  of  the  Divine  purpose  of  Progress  in  the 
universe,  and  a  firm  foundation  for  hope  in  its  continuance. 
It  thus  warrants  a  confident  expectation  of  man's  ultimate 
mastery  in  concerns  of  mind  and  of  spirit,  wherein  he  is  yet 
lamentably  weak,  comparable  to  his  present  and  increasing 
control  over  physical  forces.  The  steps  of  his  progress  during 
the  last  ten  thousand  years  are  fairly  well  known  through 
recorded  history.  But  the  beginnings  of  history  are  the  end 
of  an  immeasurably  longer  period,  during  which  he  was  slowly 
acquiring  the  arts  and  tools  that  were  indispensable  to  any 
high  advance.  The  most  essential  of  these  were  evidently 
speech,  weapons  and  implements  of  stone  and  other  natural 
materials,  fire,  clothing,  pottery,  artificial  shelter,  agriculture, 
domestication  of  animals,  smelted  metals.^  Each  of  these  was 
an  epoch-making  development,  and  some  of  them  were  doubtless 
found,  lost,  and  found  again  many  times  before  they  became 
permanent  acquisitions  almost  universally  employed;  and  each 
passed  through  a  long  course  of  gradual  improvement. 

The  last  of  these  necessary  arts,  whose  arrival  stimulated 
progress  incalculably  and  marked  the  transition  to  civilization 

^  A  paper  by  H.  G.  Wells  on  "The  Ten  Great  Discoveries,"  in  American 
Magazine  for  March,  1925,  reminds  me  that  I  might  well  have  added  to  this 
list  at  least  the  following :  the  taboo,  basis  of  morality  and  social  restraint ; 
the  boat,  with  its  influence  upon  trade  and  tolerance  of  strangers ;  the  wheel 
and  road. 

8 


INTRODUCTION  9 

and  its  history,  was  that  of  writing.  Something  is  known  con- 
cerning the  course  that  its  development  must  have  taken.^  Its 
earHest  germ  lay  in  the  attempts  of  stone-age  cave-men  to 
depict  the  actual  appearance  of  things  about  them,  so  far  as 
their  skill  allowed.  Such  skill  had  already  become  so  great  in 
prehistoric  times  as  to  result  in  representations  surprisingly 
faithful  and  beautiful  in  design  and  spirited  in  action.  Yet 
such  high  skill,  though  it  developed  independently  in  several 
distinct  places  and  epochs,  was  exceptional.  The  drawings  of 
most  primitive  peoples  are  crude  and  grotesque.  A  step  for- 
ward, not  in  art  but  in  the  evolution  of  letters,  was  made  when 
the  drawing  was  so  simplified  that  it  was  no  longer  an  attempted 
portrait  of  an  object,  but  served  merely  to  suggest  the  thought 
of  it  to  the  observer ;  and  then  a  characteristic  part  of  the  object 
instead  of  the  whole  of  it,  or  something  closely  associated  with 
it  such  as  a  peculiar  track  made  by  a  particular  animal,  served 
fully  as  well  for  the  purpose  and  made  further  simplification 
possible.  Such  designs  readily  came  to  suggest  qualities  and 
actions  and  relations,  as  well  as  objects.  When  a  considerable 
group  of  people  began  to  make  them  in  relatively  convention- 
alized forms  and  suggesting  the  same  meaning  to  all,  the  art  of 
picture-writing  had  arisen.  Simplification  and  conventional- 
izing pushed  to  such  an  extreme  that  often  little  resemblance 
to  the  original  object  remained,  led  to  the  development  of 
systems  of  hieroglyphs  and  ideographs,  which  are  merely  highly 
evolved  pictographs.  A  significant  advance  took  place  when 
the  hieroglyph  came  to  stand  for  the  sound  of  the  name  of  an 
object  or  idea,  instead  of  the  latter  itself;  for  then  it  could 
be  used,  as  is  done  in  a  modern  rebus,  to  designate  that  sound 
in  any  word  of  which  it  formed  a  part.  This  idea,  brilliant  but 
difficult,  apparently  occurred  independently  in  but  very  few 
centers  of  culture.  Later,  instead  of  standing  for  the  whole 
word,  the  glyph  was  used  sometimes  as  a  phonogram  of  its 
first  syllable  only,  a  device  which  greatly  reduced  the  number 

2  For  a  more  detailed  account  than  can  be  given  here,  see  "The  History  of 
the  Alphabet,"  by  Professor  Ingo  W.  D.  Hackh,  in  Scientific  Monthly, 
August,  1927,  page  97.  He  defends  the  belief  that  "the  Weroglyphics  of 
ancient  Egypt  are  the  parents  of  all  our  modern  alphabets." 


10  DIGHTON  ROCK 

of  symbols  needed.  A  final  step  of  vast  consequence  consisted 
in  using  the  hieroglyph,  now  reduced  to  an  ultra-simplicity 
that  bore  no  likeness  to  the  original  form  from  which  it  started, 
as  a  symbol  of  the  initial  elementary  sound  of  the  name  to 
which  it  once  belonged,  but  now  capable  of  utter  detachment 
from  the  latter  and  of  being  joined  with  other  characters  of 
like  nature  into  an  endless  variety  of  new  sounds  and  words. 
The  hieroglyph  had  become  a  letter,  a  gradual  selective  process 
produced  a  system  of  letters  of  which  few  were  needed  to 
represent  all  of  the  elementary  sounds  of  any  language,  and  the 
system  thus  became  an  alphabet. 

While  such  a  course  of  development  may  be  regarded  as 
typical,  perhaps,  yet  it  may  not  have  been  followed  exactly  in 
every  case.  Some  stages  may  have  been  omitted  at  times,  or 
others  introduced,  and  the  process  may  have  been  arrested  at 
any  phase.  For  instance,  the  syllabic  stage  may  be  dispensed 
with.  Complication  instead  of  simplification  may  occur,  as  it 
did  in  the  Maya  hieroglyphs.  The  cumbersome  Chinese  system 
is  an  example  of  complete  arrest  in  the  ideographic  form. 
Mnemonic  aids,  such  as  tally-marks,  knots  in  strings  or  notches 
in  sticks,  arbitrary  shapes  impressed  upon  any  receptive  material 
to  indicate  ownership  or  other  feature  of  identity,  marks 
devised  for  the  needs  of  calendar-records  or  of  trade,  may 
supply  some  of  the  starting  points  for  later  elaboration.  It 
has  been  suggested  that  gesture-language,  which  attained  so 
high  a  development  in  America,  may  have  been  one  source 
of  pictographic  conventions.  Even  "the  tattoo  marks  on  the 
warrior's  breast,  his  string  of  gristly  scalps,  the  bear's  claws 
around  his  neck,  were  not  only  trophies  of  his  prowess,  but 
records  of  his  exploits,  and  to  the  contemplative  mind  contain 
the  rudiments  of  the  beneficent  art  of  letters.''^ 

None  of  the  aboriginal  inhabitants  of  America  had  arrived 
at  the  development  of  a  syllabary  or  alphabet,  previous  to  their 
discovery  by  Europeans.  Yet  the  more  cultured  of  them  seem 
to  have  been  progressing  in  that  direction,  for  the  Mayas  had 
arrived  at  the  rebus  stage  of  written  records.  The  great 
majority  of  Indian  tribes,  however,  aside  from  using  as  mere 

3  Brinton,  Myths  of  the  New  World,  p.  9. 


INTRODUCTION  11 

aids  to  memory  a  variety  of  devices  that  had  no  general  mean- 
ing in  themselves,  had  never  advanced  beyond  a  rather  simple 
pictography,  capable  of  expressing  relatively  few  ideas,  before 
their  mode  of  life  became  profoundly  influenced  by  the  more 
intricate  and  varied  practices  and  arts  of  the  white  invaders. 
Many  of  them,  doubtless,  were  unacquainted  with  even  the 
simplest  forms  of  picture-writing.  After  the  possibility  and 
value  of  a  method  of  written  communication  and  record  had 
been  suggested  to  them  through  knowledge  of  the  use  made  of 
it  by  Europeans,  some  of  them  seized  the  idea  and  put  it  to 
practical  use  by  devising  systems  of  their  own.  One  case,  to 
be  discussed  in  a  later  chapter,  worked  out  on  a  native  basis 
by  missionaries,  was  a  complex  system  of  ideographs.  An- 
other, invented  by  an  untaught  native,  was  a  syllabary.  For 
the  most  part,  however,  the  stimulus  to  native  ingenuity  led 
simply  to  more  highly  elaborated  systems  of  pictography  and 
mnemonic  artifices. 

So  far  as  can  be  judged  by  the  accounts  of  early  explorers 
and  settlers  in  New  England,  the  tribes  who  dwelt  there  were 
unacquainted  with  any  form  of  writing.  It  is  possible  that 
they  knew  nothing  even  of  the  pictographic  art,  although  this 
is  a  question  which  will  demand  our  further  consideration. 
Thus  Roger  Williams  stated  in  1624  that  "they  have  no 
Bookes  nor  Letters,  and  conceive  their  Fathers  never  had;"* 
and  Daniel  Gookin  wrote  in  1674  that  "they  being  ignorant 
of  letters  and  records  of  antiquity,  any  true  knowledge  of  their 
ancestors  is  utterly  lost  among  them."^  Yet  they  did  paint 
their  faces  and  bodies,  and  also  their  "moose  and  Deere-skins 
for  their  Summer  wearing,  with  varietie  of  forms  and  col- 
ours."® They  also  employed  a  mnemonic  device  of  the  simplest 
sort,  which  was  described  by  Edward  Winslow  as  a  round  hole 
made  in  the  ground  near  the  place  of  any  remarkable  event,  as 
an  aid  to  memory  and  oral  narration,  used  "instead  of  records 
and  chronicles."^    The  rattlesnake-skin  tied  about  a  bundle  of 

'^  Key  into  the  Language  of  America,  1st  ed.,  "Introduction." 
s  "Historical  Collections  of  the  Indians" ;  Mass.  Hist.  Soc.  Collections, 
1st  ser.,  i.  141. 

6  Roger  Williams,  op.  cit.,  p.  113  his. 

^  E.  Winslow,  Good  News  from  New  England,  1624. 


12  DIGHTON  ROCK 

new  arrows  which  was  sent  to  the  Pilgrims  at  Plymouth  in 
1621  by  the  Narragansett  sachem  Canonicus,  and  which  they 
returned  to  him  filled  with  powder  and  shot,®  was  a  crude  sym- 
bolic message  of  hostility.  At  a  much  later  date,  at  least,  they 
made  use  of  belts  of  wampum  with  various  figures  embroidered 
in  them  as  mnemonic  records  of  treaties,  but  this  custom,  Brin- 
ton  thinks,®  was  probably  introduced  by  European  influences. 
So  far  as  we  can  tell  from  contemporary  chronicles,  this  may 
be  the  utmost  extent  of  their  practices  in  this  direction. 

Such  is  one  side  of  the  setting  of  the  problem  with  which 
we  are  about  to  deal. 

To  the  other  side  belong  the  numerous  speculations  concern- 
ing pre-Columbian  voyages  to  America.  There  is  no  need  to 
survey  them  here,  for  they  are  adequately  discussed  in  many 
easily  accessible  Histories.  Most  of  them  are  regarded  by  his- 
torians as  unsupported  myths ;  but  we  shall  find  that  belief  in 
them  constitutes  an  important  factor  in  our  investigation. 

It  has  long  been  widely  known  that  there  are  several  rocks 
in  New  England  on  which  are  carved  inscriptions"  of  a  mys- 
terious character,  about  which  there  has  been  a  very  great  deal 
of  long  continued  discussion.  One  of  them,  commonly  known 
as  the  Dighton  Rock,  was  noticed  fairly  early  in  Colonial  his- 
tory, soon  afterwards  was  brought  to  the  attention  of  the  Royal 
Society  in  England,  and  ever  since  then  has  aroused  an  intense 
degree  of  popular  and  scholarly  interest  and  has  been  the  sub- 
ject of  animated  and  earnest  controversy.  Strangely  differing 
presentations  have  been  made  of  its  supposed  inscriptions,  and 
strange  and  many  theories  have  been  confidently  advanced  as 
to  who  carved  the  characters  and  what  they  mean.  Already 
before  1800  a  considerable  literature  had  gathered  about  the 
subject,  and  since  then  hardly  a  single  year  has  gone  by  without 
bringing  some  printed  contribution  to  the  discussion.     Indeed, 

*  Winslow,  op.  cit.,  p.  2. 
^  Brinton,  op.  cit.,  p.  15. 
^°  I  shall  use  the  word  "inscription"  throughout  in  a  general  sense,  to 
indicate  any  kind  of  a  line  or  collection  of  lines  incised  upon  a  rock  by  in- 
tentional human  agency,  without  implication  as  to  whether  it  was  designed 
to  convey  a  meaning  and  thus  to  constitute  a  true  "writing."  Some  non- 
committal word  of  the  sort  is  needed,  and  this  serves  the  purpose  as  well 
as  any. 


INTRODUCTION  13 

it  is  doubtful  if  there  has  ever  been  any  relic  of  antiquity  any- 
where on  earth  that  has  appealed  so  strongly  to  general  interest, 
been  commented  upon  by  so  many  scholars  of  every  country, 
given  rise  to  so  extensive  a  literature,  and  so  long  remained 
an  unsolved  mystery.  Although  Dighton  Rock  has  been  the 
chief  centre  of  all  this  speculation,  yet  it  is  not  the  only  one  in 
New  England  that  bears  unreadable  inscriptions.  A  few  others 
have  been  known  almost  as  long  as  it,  still  others  rumored  but 
in  need  of  confirmation,  and  a  few  discovered  recently  or  only 
recently  described  for  the  first  time. 

In  spite  of  this  abundance  of  material  and  the  long-enduring 
interest  and  discussion,  no  one,  up  to  the  time  when  this  par- 
ticular study  of  the  subject  began,  had  made  a  complete  survey 
of  the  problem,  at  once  thorough  and  critical.  Some  compre- 
hensive reviews  had  been  attempted  and  had  served  as  the  basis 
for  later  statements  and  deductions,  but  it  needed  only  a  little 
of  careful  examination  to  discover  that  they  were  unreliable. 
A  considerable  amount  of  historical  misinformation  was  cur- 
rent, untrustworthy  depictions  of  the  inscriptions  were  accepted 
as  adequate  support  for  particular  theories,  romantic  appeal 
often  usurped  the  place  of  scientific  judgment  as  a  foundation 
for  belief,  pertinent  facts  of  wide  variety  were  left  uninvesti- 
gated or  ignored.  No  well  trained  archaeologist  equipped  with 
knowledge  of  up-to-date  methods  of  research  undertook  the 
task  of  assembling  the  facts,  historical  and  scientific,  and  thus 
modern  archaeological  opinion  was  founded  upon  insufficient 
information.  It  was  evident  that  the  whole  matter  needed  to 
be  examined  anew,  without  bias  and  without  reliance  upon 
what  had  been  said  before,  until  fresh  observation  should  have 
established  the  things  that  could  be  depended  upon  as  unques- 
tionable or  accepted  as  reasonable  probability.  The  result  of 
conducting  such  an  inquiry  has  been  the  discovery  of  an 
astonishing  mass  of  new  facts  and  new  possibilities,  and  the 
gratification  of  finding  in  the  study  an  amazing  variety  of 
appeals  to  interest.  Before  one  has  finished  with  the  investiga- 
tion, he  will  have  found  involved  in  it  matters  not  only  of 
history  and  archaeology,  but  likewise  of  myth  and  legend,  of 


14  DIGHTON  ROCK 

astronomy  and  geology,  of  religion  and  aesthetics,  of  ethnology 
and  literature,  of  graphic  art  and  that  of  faithful  deciphering 
and  copying,  of  fundamental  scientific  method  in  observation 
and  hypothesis,  of  logic  and  psychology  and  philosophy. 

The  problems  presented  by  the  existence  of  these  inscribed 
rocks  and  stones  in  New  England  are  many.  We  must  discover 
exactly  how  many  of  them  there  are  and  where  they  are  situ- 
ated. The  answer  to  this  question  will  involve  the  examination 
of  a  great  many  rumors  and  claims,  often  vague  but  sometimes 
definite,  and  the  determination  as  to  whether  they  are  well 
founded  or  are  partly  or  completely  erroneous,  whether  due  to 
careless  reports  assigning  genuine  petroglyphs  to  mistaken 
localities,  or  to  mistaken  belief  that  marks  having  a  natural 
origin  are  human  inscriptions,  or  that  work  of  recent  and 
trivial  origin,  as  by  boys  at  play  or  by  men  idly  scratching 
insignificant  marks  just  for  the  fun  of  it  or  to  mystify  others, 
is  ancient  and  significant.  It  will  be  found  necessary  also  to 
inquire  in  some  cases  as  to  whether  marks  due  to  unquestionable 
human  agency  are  deliberate  inscriptions  or  accidental  scratches, 
and  in  other  cases  as  to  whether  unquestionable  inscriptions 
are  genuine  records  of  an  unknown  past  or  are  recent  and 
fraudulent  imitations.  Cases  of  all  these  types  will  come  to 
our  notice.  Having  accomplished  this  sifting  process,  it  will 
be  desirable  to  secure  a  faithful  representation  of  the  appear- 
ance of  each  inscription,  or  at  least  of  the  more  important  of 
them.  In  some  cases  good  drawings  will  suffice.  But  when- 
ever there  is  any  possibility  of  doubt  occasioned  by  difficulty 
in  deciphering  what  was  originally  inscribed,  the  best  attainable 
photographs  under  controlled  conditions  of  lighting  will  be 
indispensable.  It  will  be  of  interest  for  psychological  as  well 
as  historical  reasons  to  assemble  all  earlier  serious  attempts  to 
depict  the  appearance  of  the  inscriptions,  and  to  survey  the 
numerous  theories,  some  of  them  of  the  most  extraordinary 
character,  that  have  been  advocated  to  account  for  them.  Then, 
finally,  we  shall  endeavor  to  arrive  at  conclusions  of  our  own 
both  in  regard  to  what  actually  has  been  inscribed  and  what 
it  probably  signifies.     In  both  respects  we  shall  arrive  at  re- 


INTRODUCTION  15 

suits  fundamentally  different  from  anything  that  has  been  pre- 
sented before,  during  the  two  hundred  and  fifty  years  of 
earnestly  conducted  observation  and  discussion. 

With  these  rather  intricate  and  difficult  tasks  accomplished, 
we  shall  have  found  at  least  partial  solutions  of  certain  other 
problems.  Is  there  any  possibility  that  these  inscriptions  give 
evidence  of  visits  to  these  shores  by  ancient  peoples,  Norse  or 
other,  long  before  the  discovery  by  Columbus  ?  Do  they  throw 
any  light  on  prehistoric  wanderings  of  Indian  tribes?  Could 
they  by  any  possibility  have  been  executed  by  white  men  at 
some  time  later  than  1492?  If  made  by  Indians,  was  it  before 
their  acquaintance  with  Europeans  began,  or  at  a  later  date 
and  as  a  result  of  European  influence?  Or  is  there  in  them 
a  mingling  of  these  various  sources?  Do  they  have  any  dis- 
coverable significance,  pictographic  or  other,  or  are  they  mere 
meaningless  pictures  and  scribblings?  Do  they  give  any  indi- 
cation as  to  how  far  the  Indians  of  New  England  had  pro- 
gressed in  the  use  of  symbolic  records  of  their  own  initiative, 
and  to  what  degree  their  contact  with  a  new  civilization  worked 
in  stimulating  further  development?  We  may  not  be  able  to 
answer  all  of  these  questions  with  complete  certainty,  yet  we 
shall  surely  find  contributions  toward  the  solution  of  some  of 
them.  Not  the  least  valuable  feature  of  our  investigation 
will  consist  in  the  illustrations  of  various  mental  processes  that 
it  will  afford,  and  the  aid  that  it  will  give  toward  a  better  under- 
standing of  the  psychology  of  observation  and  belief. 

The  first  of  these  rocks  to  be  brought  to  the  attention  of  the 
world  was  the  Dighton  Rock.  A  description  of  it  by  Cotton 
Mather  in  1690  aroused  little  interest.  But  in  1714  a  com- 
munication from  him  to  the  Royal  Society,  mentioning  its 
existence  and  giving  a  very  inaccurate  illustration  of  its  inscrip- 
tion, was  published  in  the  Philosophical  Transactions  of  that 
Society  and  attracted  a  great  deal  of  attention.  In  1781,  Court 
de  Gebelin  published  in  Paris  an  account  of  it,  with  an  elaborate 
translation  attributing  the  inscription  to  a  party  of  Phoenician 
adventurers  from  Carthage.  Michael  Lort  of  London  assem- 
bled in  1786  all  the  facts  about  the  rock  and  its  history  that  he 


16  DIGHTON  ROCK 

could  discover.  In  1837,  Charles  Christian  Rafn  of  Denmark 
brought  out  his  monumental  work  called  Antiquitates  Ameri- 
cance,  in  which  he  included  a  considerable  amount  of  new 
information  about  this  and  other  inscribed  rocks.  He  made 
a  new  translation  of  the  record  on  Dighton  Rock,  and  claimed 
that  it  was  carved  by  the  party  of  Thorfinn  Karlsefne  the 
Norseman,  who  made  an  attempt  at  colonization  in  Vinland  in 
the  year  1007.  These  are  the  main  sources  from  which  all 
accounts  of  the  history  of  Dighton  Rock  have  been  drawn 
heretofore.  They  are  all  of  them  incomplete,  inaccurate,  and 
marred  by  a  considerable  content  of  positive  error.  Instead 
of  relying  upon  them,  we  shall  examine  afresh  the  actual  facts 
as  to  its  history,  make  our  own  observations  as  to  its  character 
and  situation  and  the  appearance  of  its  inscription,  and 
endeavor  to  arrive  at  a  well-founded  interpretation  of  its 
record. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE    DIGHTON    WRITING   ROCK 

Among  the  other  curiosities  of  New  England — so  runs  in 
part  the  earliest  printed  description  of  this  mysterious  stone — 
one  is  that  of  a  mighty  rock,  on  a  perpendicular  side  whereof, 
by  a  river  which  at  high  tide  covers  part  of  it,  there  are  very 
deeply  engraved,  no  man  alive  knows  how  or  when,  lines  filled 
with  strange  characters ;  which  would  suggest  as  odd  thoughts 
about  them  that  were  here  before  us,  as  there  are  odd  shapes  in 
that  elaborate  monument.  The  river  on  whose  shore  it  stands 
was  then  known  as  the  Taunton  Great  River,  and  the  shallow 
cove  which  cuts  into  the  land  there  was  called  Smith's  Cove, 
although  the  Indians  had  given  the  much  more  picturesque 
name  Chippascutt  to  the  locality.  Early  observers  spoke  of 
the  wonder-provoking  stone  as  the  Dighton  Writing  Rock,  and 
speculated  vainly  as  to  the  "how  and  when''  of  its  unreadable 
characters.  Later  it  became  known  commonly  as  Dighton 
Rock,  although  it  was  rarely  referred  to  also  as  the  Assonet 
Monument.  It  is  not  in  what  is  now  known  as  Dighton,  but 
across  the  Taunton  river  from  that  town,  about  eight  miles 
down-river  from  Taunton.  The  land  on  which  it  stands  is 
near  the  northwesterly  corner  of  Assonet  Neck,  a  triangular 
peninsula  two  miles  long  and  about  a  mile  in  greatest  width, 
lying  between  Taunton  and  Assonet  Rivers  and  forming  a 
southerly  projection  of  the  town  of  Berkley  (Figure  3).  In 
early  days,  however,  Assonet  Neck  was  included  within  the 
limits  first  of  Taunton  and  afterwards  of  Dighton,  and  so  the 
name  given  to  the  rock  was  then  appropriate.  Dighton  had 
been  set  off  from  Taunton  in  1712.  It  was  not  until  1799  that 
the  Neck  was  detached  from  Dighton,  and  made  a  part  of 
Berkley,  which  had  been  incorporated  in  1735.  Together  with 
Mount  Hope  in  Bristol,  Rhode  Island,  Assonet  Neck  was  the 

17 


18 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


ASSONET  KECK,   BERKLEY,  MASSACHUSETTS 
Based  upon  U,  S.  Coast  &  Geodetic  Survey  "by  A.  M,  Harrison  1875 
and  upon  U,  S.  Topographical  Surrey  Map  1905 


Figure  3 


THE  DIGHTON  WRITING  ROCK  19 

last  land  retained  by  the  Wampanoag  Indians  for  their  own 
exclusive  use.  As  late  as  1673,  a  deposition  was  filed  in  the 
records  of  the  Colony  of  New  Plymouth,  testifying  that  the 
Neck  was  the  personal  property  of  an  Indian  named  Piowant. 
In  1676  it  was  seized  by  Plymouth  Colony  as  spoils  of  war,  and 
the  next  year  it  was  sold  to  six  men  of  Taunton,  its  first  "pro- 
prietors." Long  before  that,  however,  the  extensive  salt-grass 
meadows  which  border  it  had  been  ceded  to  the  Proprietors  of 
Taunton  as  an  important  source  of  hay,  and  the  Neck  itself  had 
been  coveted  by  them,  but  not  secured,  as  a  place  for  "pasture- 
ing  yeong  beasts." 

In  the  midst  of  Smith's  Cove,  fifty-six  rods  north  of  the 
Rock,  lies  Grassy  Island,'  a  little  over  an  acre  in  extent,  which 
is  of  interest  for  two  reasons.  It  has  a  level  surface,  which  is 
entirely  submerged  at  high  tides,  sometimes  to  a  depth  of  three 
feet  or  more.  Three  or  four  feet  below  its  surface,  and  under- 
neath the  peat  of  which  it  is  formed,  lies  a  deeper  surface  of 
sandy  clay  on  which  are  found  numerous  specimens  of  stone 
implements  that  seem  to  give  evidence  that  a  thousand  years 
ago  or  more  this  latter  surface,  and  therefore  Dighton  Rock 
with  it,  was  well  above  the  reach  of  the  water  and  was  the  site 
of  an  Indian  encampment."  In  the  second  place,  the  island  is 
mentioned  by  name  as  early  as  1644  as  belonging  to  one  of 
the  first  ministers  of  Taunton,  and  must  have  been  assigned 
to  him  shortly  after  a  court  order  had  been  issued  in  1640  to 
the  effect  that  he  should  be  provided  with  meadow-land.  Refer- 
ence to  the  map  will  show  that  there  are  extensive  salt-grass 
meadows  about  Assonet  Neck  and  Bay,  and  these  became  the 
most  important  early  source  of  hay   for  the  inhabitants  of 

^  See  Figures  2  and  3. 

2  See  "A  Possible  Pre-Algonkian  Culture  in  Southeastern  Massachu- 
setts," by  Edmund  Burke  Delabarre,  American  Anthropologist,  July,_  1925, 
xxvii.  359-369. — In  the  spring  of  1927,  I  found  on  the  same  site,  ten  inches 
below  the  ancient  deeper  surface,  a  deposit  of  bones,  broken  into  small  frag- 
ments and  lying  together  in  a  compact  mass  about  ten  to  twelve  inches  in 
diameter  and  an  inch  or  two  in  thickness.  In  the  opinion  of  Mr.  C.  C.  Wil- 
loughby,  Director  of  the  Peabody  Museum  of  Harvard  University,  they  are 
"undoubtedly  what  remains  of  a  cremated  human  body."  Their  situation 
makes  it  practically  impossible  that  they  could  be  the  result  of  a  burial  since 
the  site  became  a  peat-covered  and  tide-washed  island,  and  therefore  indicates 
that  they  are  those  of  an  Indian  who  lived  there  more  than  a  thousand 
years  ago. 


20  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Taunton.  The  Grassy  Island  date  on  their  records,  therefore, 
assures  us  that  the  earhest  settlers  at  Taunton,  very  soon  after 
their  arrival  in  1637,  became  intimately  acquainted  with  this 
locality  and  consequently  with  the  existence  of  Dighton  Rock, 
whether  or  not  it  already  bore  any  of  its  present  inscriptions. 
It  was  not  until  very  much  later  than  that,  nevertheless,  that 
any  mention  of  it  was  made  which  has  come  down  to  us. 

There  are  a  few  other  facts  about  Assonet  Neck  that  have 
some  bearing  upon  the  problems  that  will  confront  us.  Isaac 
Greenwood  in  1730  said  that  it  was  "one  of  the  most  con- 
siderable seats  of  Indians  in  this  part  of  the  world,  and  the 
river  remarkable  for  all  sorts  of  fowl  and  fish."  This  is  prob- 
ably an  exaggeration,  for  all  of  their  known  important  centers 
of  residence  were  located  elsewhere.  Yet  there  must  be  a  de- 
gree of  truth  in  it,  for  it  still  bears  traces  of  former  Indian 
occupancy.  One  or  two  probable  sites  of  villages  are  indicated 
by  stone  artefacts  still  found  upon  them  in  considerable  num- 
bers, and  there  are  a  few  not  very  extensive  shell-heaps.  That 
at  least  the  entire  southerly  half  of  the  twelve  hundred  acres 
of  the  Neck  were  under  cultivation  is  made  probable  by  the 
fact  that  the  old  Indian  corn-hills  are  still  clearly  evident  there, 
in  all  of  the  woods  and  pastures  which  have  never  been 
ploughed,  in  spite  of  the  three  hundred  years  that  have  elapsed 
since  the  great  plague  destroyed  a  large  proportion  of  the  Wam- 
panoags.^  A  tradition  seems  to  have  existed  among  the  Indians 
of  this  vicinity  pointing  to  an  early  visit  of  white  men  in  a 
sailing  vessel  and  a  resulting  encounter  between  the  men  of  the 
two  races.  We  shall  have  need  to  consider  it  more  in  detail  in 
a  later  discussion.  It  was  reported  first  by  Danforth  in  1680, 
and  later  independently  by  Kendall  in  1807.  Kendall  also 
speaks  of  a  tradition  that  Assonet  Neck  was  a  place  of  banish- 
ment among  the  Indians.  There  was  in  fact  a  "place  commonly 
called  the  Banished  Indians,"  either  on  or  near  Assonet  Neck, 
mentioned  in  documents  as  early  as  1660.*    It  seems  likely  that 

3  "Indian  Cornhills  in  Massachusetts,"  by  E.  B.  Delabarre  and  H.  H. 
Wilder,  Amer.  Anthropologist,  1920,  xxii.  203. 

*  E.  W.  Peirce,  Indian  History,  p.  241.  This  date  is  ten  years  earlier 
than  the  earliest  one  known  to  me  at  the  time  of  my  previous  discussion  of 
these  questions,  in  Publications  Colon.  Sac.  Mass.,  1917,  xviii.  244-247. 


THE  DIGHTON  WRITING  ROCK  21 

this  name,  and  that  of  a  small  island  off  the  southerly  point  of 
Assonet  Neck  called  The  Conspiracy,  may  have  originated  in 
connection  with  events  occurring  between  1642  and  1645, 
when  there  existed  a  belief  in  a  wide-spread  conspiracy  of  the 
Indians  against  the  Colonies,  and  when  the  Narragansetts  held 
a  number  of  Mohegans  in  captivity  somewhere  in  this  vicinity. 
So  far  as  I  can  judge  from  the  imperfect  descriptions,  the  place 
called  the  Banished  Indians  was  probably  not  on  the  Neck 
itself,  but  across  the  mouth  of  the  Assonet  river  from  it,  some- 
where near  Barnaby  Cove  or  the  small  cove  next  north  of  it. 
In  the  opinion  of  G.  W.  Ellis,  this  was  approximately  the  scene 
of  the  Pocasset  Swamp  fight  which  occurred  in  1675  near  the 
beginning  of  King  Philip's  War.  It  was  also  not  far  from  a 
place  which  we  find  referred  to  in  1705  under  the  peculiar 
name  Behinde  Noon. 

Dighton  Rock  is  a  gray,  medium  to  coarse  grained  f eld- 
spathic  sandstone  boulder,  presenting  toward  the  river  a  nearly 
plane  and  smooth  natural  face,  inclined  at  an  angle  of  39°  to 
the  vertical.  Although  it  has  sometimes  been  regarded  as  a 
projecting  portion  of  a  ledge,  its  true  nature  as  a  detached 
boulder  has  been  established  by  excavations  around  its  sides 
carried  as  far  down  as  the  inflowing  water  would  permit,  and 
deeper  exploration  by  means  of  a  stick  thrust  down  through 
the  ooze  in  contact  with  the  rock.  Its  dimensions  below  ground 
as  well  as  above  have  thus  been  determined.  The  exposed 
face  toward  the  river  measures  about  eleven  feet  in  average 
horizontal  length,  and  four  feet  ten  inches  in  extreme  vertical 
width  or  height.  The  rear  or  shoreward  slope  above  ground 
has  a  width  of  about  7  feet  9^  inches  and  an  average  inclina- 
tion of  about  65°  to  the  vertical,  but  is  very  irregular,  probably 
being  much  worn  and  broken.  These  two  slopes  meet  above  at 
an  angle,  and  end  below  at  about  the  level  of  the  beach,  where 
the  two  underground  surfaces  begin  to  incline  inward  toward 
one  another.  Each  of  these  extends  down  for  about  seven  or 
eight  feet,  until  they  meet  below  at  an  angle  of  about  91°.  A 
vertical  section  through  the  rock  from  front  to  rear  would  thus 
present  a  nearly  diamond-shaped  figure,  with  one  of  its  angles 


22  DIGHTON  ROCK 

underneath.  The  weight  of  such  a  prism,  eleven  feet  long,  as 
nearly  as  it  can  be  calculated,  would  be  not  far  from  forty  tons, 
and  its  cubic  contents  about  480  cubic  feet.  Probably  seven- 
tenths  of  the  bulk  of  the  rock  lies  underground.  A  line  drawn 
longitudinally  through  the  exposed  face  parallel  to  the  beach, 
correcting  for  magnetic  deviation,  is  directed  about  N  60°  E, 
although  its  upstream  end  is  usually  referred  to  as  the  north  end 
of  the  rock. 

The  rock  is  situated  on  the  beach,  between  high  and  low 
water  marks.  At  some  low  tides,  the  lowest  part  of  the  face 
is  not  quite  fully  exposed,  but  at  lowest  ebb  the  water  recedes 
entirely  away  from  the  base,  leaving  fifteen  feet  or  more  of 
stony  and  muddy  beach  exposed  between  rock  and  river.  The 
most  moderate  of  high  tides  just  cover  the  rock  completely,  and 
at  extreme  high  waters  there  is,  a  depth  of  3>^  to  4>^  feet  above 
its  top. 

A  number  of  other  rocks  protrude  from  the  beach  in  the 
near  vicinity.  One  of  them  has  often  been  spoken  of  as  a 
"neighboring  slab,"  because  it  looks  like  a  large  slab  of  stone 
lying  flat  on  the  beach,  with  only  three  or  four  inches  of  its 
thickness  exposed.  It  is  really,  however,  a  boulder  with  a  flat 
upper  surface.  This  surface,  in  shape  and  dimensions,  is 
closely  similar  to  the  face  of  the  Rock,  and  lies  only  a  few 
feet  away,  behind  and  southward  from  the  latter.  It  is  not  at 
all  impossible  that  the  two  were  originally  one  boulder,  and  that 
something  occurred  to  cause  the  Rock  to  split  off  from  the 
slab,  roll  forward  2^  quarter-turns,  and  there  settle  edge-down 
in  the  mud  and  gravel.  The  present  relative  positions  of  the 
two  would  thus  be  exactly  accounted  for.  If  this  happened 
while  Indians  were  living  there,  as  something  similar  did  hap- 
pen to  a  huge  boulder  on  Assonet  River  in  the  great  gale  of 
1815,  it  is  not  impossible  that  the  name  Chippascutt  which  they 
gave  to  the  locality  may  have  commemorated  the  event;  for 
one  possible  meaning  of  the  word  is  "the  place  of  the  split- 
apart  rock."  There  is,  however,  on  the  upland  not  very  far 
away,  a  "cleft  of  rocks"  mentioned  as  a  landmark  in  earliest 
deeds,  that  may  equally  well  have  served  as  the  basis  of  the 
name. 


Fig.  4.     The  up-stream  end  of  Dighton  Rock 


Fig.   5.     A  flashlight   view  of  the   Dighton  Rock  inscriptions 
Facing  page  22 


THE  DIGHTON  WRITING  ROCK  23 

With  its  alternate  exposure  to  air  and  to  salt  water,  the  face 
of  the  rock  weathers  to  a  reddish-brown  rusty  color,  and  is 
slightly  roughened  by  minute  pittings  due  to  the  decomposition 
of  the  feldspar  and  other  constituents  in  the  midst  of  the  more 
resistant  network  of  quartz.  It  is  crossed  longitudinally  by  a 
number  of  narrow  cracks,  and  along  these  in  a  few  places  small 
thin  sections  of  the  surface  have  scaled  off.  At  certain  times 
of  year,  parts  of  the  face  are  covered  thinly  with  a  greenish 
marine  growth  of  algae  and  diatoms,  but  at  other  times  these 
are  entirely  absent.  A  great  many  observers  have  believed 
that  under  the  influence  of  storms  and  ice,  the  surface  of  the 
rock  wears  away  rapidly,  causing  a  noticeable  diminution  in  the 
depth  and  legibility  of  the  engraved  characters  within  the  space 
of  a  lifetime;  or,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  present  difficulty 
of  deciphering  them  indicates  that  they  are  worn  with  age  and 
must  have  been  carved  a  very  long  time,  perhaps  centuries,  ago. 
The  two  beliefs  are  incompatible  with  one  another,  though 
often  held  both  by  one  person,  and  we  shall  see  later,  after  we 
have  had  opportunity  to  compare  early  and  recent  descriptions 
and  photographs,  that  both  of  them  are  mistaken  impressions. 
Shallow  incisions  made  in  the  rock,  as  a  great  many  of  these 
were,  become  difficult  to  discern  within  a  comparatively  few 
years,  through  change  of  color  rather  than  through  wear;  but 
the  actual  wear  of  the  surface  is  so  slow  that  it  is  not  appreci- 
ably more  difficult  to  read  what  was  carved  upon  it  now,  than  it 
was  when  the  rock  first  came  under  observation,  two  hundred 
and  fifty  years  ago.  Its  appearance,  therefore,  affords  no  indi- 
cation as  to  how  old  the  inscriptions  are.  If  they  had  been 
made  centuries  ago,  they  would  probably  have  been  tenaciously 
retained,  much  as  we  find  them;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  if  they 
had  existed  only  for  a  few  decades  before  1680,  that  time 
would  have  been  long  enough  to  make  the  more  shallow  of  them 
dim  and  uncertain,  just  as  they  have  always  appeared. 

In  addition  to  what  we  may  call  the  "inscription,"  all  of 
which  was  presumably  there  at  the  time  of  the  first  observa- 
tion, in  1680,  the  face  of  the  rock  bears  a  considerable  number 
of  initials  and  dates  made  by  thoughtless  persons  in  the  nine- 


24  DIGHTON  ROCK 

teenth  and  present  centuries.  On  the  shoreward  slope,  also, 
are  numerous  initials.  None  of  them  are  recent,  yet  all  were 
probably  made  by  white  men,  and  therefore  within  the  last 
three  hundred  years ;  most  of  them,  very  likely,  during  the  last 
century.  In  spite  of  their  relatively  recent  date,  they  look  as 
old  as  do  any  of  the  characters  on  the  face,  and  there  is  hardly 
an  instance  in  which  I  can  be  sure  as  to  exactly  what  initials 
were  traced.  The  same  fact  appears  in  the  case  of  still  another 
small  inscription  on  the  rock.  On  its  vertical  up-stream  end 
(Figure  4),  there  is  something  faintly  discernible,  but  it  can 
be  seen  only  rarely,  under  the  most  favorable  conditions  of 
light.  Ezra  Stiles  mentioned  it  first  in  1767,  and  suggested 
that  it  looked  somewhat  like  "I  HOWOO."  Only  two  ob- 
servers have  spoken  of  having  seen  it  since.  I  see  it  occa- 
sionally, with  no  assurance  as  to  what  was  actually  written. 
Yet  Stiles  was  informed  by  persons  who  apparently  knew  the 
facts  that  this  particular  inscription  had  been  made  not  more 
than  about  thirty  years  before  the  time  of  his  visit ;  and  I  judge 
from  his  description  that  it  was  as  difficult  for  him  to  decipher 
it  then  as  it  is  for  us  today.  My  own  best  guess  is  that  it  may 
be  the  name  Greenwood^  and  therefore  carved  in  1730.  These 
facts,  then,  seem  to  add  valuable  support  to  our  conclusion  that 
dim  and  uncertain  appearance  affords  no  clue  as  to  age,  because 
shallow  characters  become  rapidly  obscure,  mainly  on  account 
of  their  change  in  color,  but  last  then  for  a  very  long  time 
with  very  little  wear  or  further  diminution  in  legibility. 

The  face  of  the  rock  toward  the  river  is  nearly  covered  with 
incisions,^  pecked  in  with  some  sharp  tool.  There  seems  to  be 
no  decisive  indication  as  to  whether  the  tool  was  of  metal  or  of 
hard  stone.  The  depth  and  consequent  clearness  of  the  cutting 
varies  widely.  I  made  an  accurate  depth-gauge  to  measure 
them,  and  found  that  the  great  majority  of  lines,  representing 
the  average  and  characteristic  results,  have  a  depth  ranging 
from  about  two  millimeters  down  to  a  mere  trace  so  superficial 
that  it  could  not  be  measured.  The  best  marked,  most  clearly 
discernible  lines,  fairly  numerous  yet  less  so  than  the  others, 

6  See  Figure  5,  and  the  figures  illustrating  Chapter  X. 


THE  DIGHTON  WRITING  ROCK  25 

vary  between  two  and  three  millimeters.  This  depth  is  very 
rarely  exceeded.  There  are  only  two  or  three  places  where  it 
is  as  much  as  five  millimeters,  and  one  single  hole,  apparently 
artificial,  where  it  is  17  millimeters.  Some  recent  initials,  how- 
ever, are  cut  to  a  depth  of  five  to  nine  millimeters.  The  color 
of  all  of  the  lines,  whether  of  earlier  inscription  or  of  later 
initials,  even  of  a  date  "[18] 87,"  is  the  same  as  that  of  the 
surrounding  rock.  Unless  they  are  cut  fairly  deep,  this  makes 
them  hard  to  detect  and  to  distinguish  from  the  natural  pit- 
tings  and  other  weatherings  of  the  surface. 

Not  only  is  there  this  difficulty  of  deciding  how  much  of 
what  one  sees  is  artificial  and  how  much  due  to  natural  causes, 
but  also,  when  one  has  arrived  at  some  conclusion  as  to  what  he 
may  plausibly  accept  as  artificial,  there  is  such  a  confusion  of 
lines  and  such  a  certainty  that  not  all  of  them  have  been  dis- 
covered, that  a  still  further  difficulty  arises.  In  what  manner 
do  they  belong  together  ?  What  shapes  and  figures  and  pictures 
were  they  intended  to  present?  Some  of  them  are  clearly  pic- 
torial, representations  of  men  or  animals.  Some  are  clearly 
arranged  in  more  or  less  regular  designs,  whose  meaning,  how- 
ever, is  not  easy  to  determine.  A  considerable  number  of  them 
look  as  if  they  might  be  alphabetical  characters,  but  we  cannot 
be  sure  that  this  is  their  intention  unless  we  can  satisfy  our- 
selves that  critical  scrutiny  does  not  diminish  the  likeness,  and 
can  then  give  them  a  significant  connection  and  meaning.  Until 
my  own  interpretations  had  occurred  to  me,  this  had  never  been 
done  satisfactorily  in  a  single  instance;  and  when  our  discussion 
is  completed,  it  may  be  that  the  reader  will  decide  that  it  has  not 
been  accomplished  even  now,  and  that  therefore  these  appear- 
ances are  merely  unintended  resemblances,  giving  no  proof  that 
there  are  any  unquestionable  alphabetical  characters  there  at 
all.  Besides  these  forms  which  suggest  something  definite,  even 
if  not  interpretable,  there  are  great  numbers  of  other  lines, 
some  sure,  some  only  possible,  that  run  about  everywhere  in 
incomprehensible  jumbles.  Within  them  it  is  easy  to  imagine 
the  depiction  of  almost  anything  one  will,  but  the  cautious 
observer  cannot  accept  these  suggested  possibilities  as  having 


26  DIGHTON  ROCK 

any  sure  objective  validity.  It  is  this  intricate  mass  of  at  least 
possible  lines,  observable  in  so  very  many  alternative  ways, 
together  with  the  fact  that  it  is  exceedingly  difficult  for  anyone 
to  be  an  ideally  cautious  observer  even  when  he  tries  to  be  so 
and  is  confident  that  he  has  succeeded,  that  accounts  for  the 
truly  extraordinary  diversity  of  the  different  drawings  of  the 
inscription  that  have  been  made.  Some  of  them  are  so  utterly 
different  in  important  particulars  that  it  seems  almost  impos- 
sible at  first  sight  to  believe  that  they  represent  the  same  object.* 
In  turn,  a  great  many  of  the  different,  especially  of  the  more 
detailed,  theories  as  to  the  meaning  of  the  inscription  have  been 
due  to  accepting  some  one  of  these  undependable  drawings  as 
constituting  accurate  representations  of  the  facts.  These  theories 
have  been  as  extraordinarily  numerous  and  varied  as  the  draw- 
ings themselves.  It  will  be  profitable  to  examine  them  in  their 
historical  development  and  to  satisfy  ourselves  as  to  their 
inadequacy,  before  we  attempt  the  difficult  task  of  determining 
for  ourselves  what  the  rock  actually  contains  and  what  is  its 
significance. 

Until  the  close  of  King  Philip's  War,  Assonet  Neck,  on 
which  the  Writing  Rock  is  situated,  was  the  property  of  the 
Wampanoag  Indians.  As  early  as  March  10,  1676,  the  Colony 
of  New  Plymouth  looked  upon  the  Neck  as  belonging  to  it  by 
right  of  conquest.  On  November  12,  1677,  it  sold  the  Neck 
to  six  proprietors.  These  men  made  an  agreement  of  division 
on  March  23,  1680,  and  the  portion  which  included  the  rock 
was  set  off  to  James  Walker,  a  prominent  proprietor  of  Taun- 
ton.    After  that  it  remained  in  private  ownership  until  June 

^  See  Figure  6,  showing  the  best  known  drawings  of  the  rock  as  they 
are  commonly  presented.  Not  only  do  they  differ  much  from  one  another, 
but  these  reproductions  themselves  differ  from  the  original  drawings.  Re- 
liable facsimiles  of  the  originals  from  which  they  were  copied  are  given  in 
my  Colonial  Society  papers.  In  this  volume,  I  have  contented  myself  with 
presenting  only  a  few  of  the  more  accurate  versions  of  drawings  included 
in  Figure  6,  and  a  few  illustrative  examples  of  the  many  other  drawings 
and  photographs  of  Dighton  Rock.  The  reader  who  may  wish  to  examine 
critically  all  versions  of  the  drawings,  and  all  photographs  from  interpreta- 
tive chalkings,  will  need  to  consult  the  Colonial  Society  papers.  Nothing  is 
omitted  here,  however,  which  is  requisite  for  interpretation  of  the  inscription. 
The  other  rocks  discussed  in  this  volume  are  illustrated  as  fully  as  possible. 
For  a  description  of  the  sources  from  which  the  illustrations  have  been 
taken,  the  List  of  Illustrations  should  be  consulted. 


Bcticcen  pages  26-27 


Fig.  6.     Best  known  drawings  of  Dighton  Rock,  made  before  the  introduction  of  photography 


THE  DIGHTON  WRITING  ROCK  27 

23,  1860,  when  Niels  Arnzen  of  Fall  River,  who  had  purchased 
the  rock  at  the  request  of  Ole  Bull,  the  violinist,  made  a  gift 
of  it  to  the  Royal  Society  of  Northern  Antiquaries  at  Copen- 
hagen. This  Society  transferred  it  in  1877  to  the  Scandinavian 
Memorial  Club  of  Boston.  But  the  latter  was  not  legally  in- 
corporated and  could  not  legally  own  property.  Consequently, 
on  January  30,  1889,  the  Danish  Society  deeded  the  property 
anew  to  the  Old  Colony  Historical  Society  of  Taunton,  its 
present  owner. 

There  have  been  many  proposals  from  time  to  time  to 
remove  the  rock  from  its  present  position  to  a  place  where  it 
would  be  safe  from  the  attacks  of  vandals  and  more  accessible 
for  observation.  The  first  of  these,  apparently,  contemplated 
its  removal  to  Fall  River,  in  1829.^  The  Rhode  Island  His- 
torical Society  considered  the  possibility  of  purchasing  it,  in 
1838.  Between  1861  and  1864,  the  Royal  Society  of  Northern 
Antiquaries  was  intending  to  remove  the  rock  to  Denmark. 
There  is  reference  about  1873  to  another  indefinite  project  to 
split  off  the  inscribed  face,  probably  for  some  museum.  In 
1877,  the  Committee  in  charge  of  the  erection  of  the  Leif 
Erikson  statue  in  Boston  were  proposing  to  remove  the  rock 
to  that  city.  Each  of  these  schemes  was  abandoned  in  the  end, 
and  the  rock  still  occupies  its  original  site.^  Perhaps  it  is 
appropriate  that  it  should  continue  to  do  so;  but  at  least  there 
ought  to  be  devised  some  w^ay  of  protecting  it  from  the  thought- 
less persons  who  mar  its  ancient  and  still  insufficiently  studied 
records  by  carving  their  own  initials  among  them. 

'^Columbian  Reporter  (Taunton,  Mass.),  Dec.  2,  1829. 

8  Owing  to  circumstances  set  forth  in  Chapter  X,  a  large  interest  has 
been  aroused  recently  among  the  Portuguese.  It  is  possible  that  this  may 
lead  to  the  adoption  of  some  plan  for  the  better  protection  of  the  rock. 


CHAPTER  III 

EARLY    INTEREST    IN    DIGHTON    ROCK 

It  is  now  a  matter  of  common  knowledge  that  there  are  a 
great  many  petroglyphs  scattered  widely  through  the  United 
States,  many  of  whose  inscribed  drawings,  unquestionably 
made  by  Indians  of  the  historically  known  tribes,  resemble 
in  essential  character  some  of  those  upon  Dighton  Rock.  We 
must  not  be  too  sure,  however,  at  the  start,  that  this  means  that 
everything  upon  our  Rock  must  have  had  a  similar  origin. 
Aside  from  this  larger  acquaintance  with  the  wide  distribution 
of  such  work,  very  nearly  all  of  what  was  known  concerning 
Dighton  Rock  up  to  the  time  when  these  studies  began  was 
contained  in  the  accounts  published  by  Lort  in  1787  and  by 
Rafn  in  1837.  These  writers,  we  have  seen,  not  only  omit  im- 
portant particulars,  but  include  a  considerable  amount  of  actual 
error.  Instead  of  following  them  as  authorities,  we  must  seek 
original  and  trustworthy  sources. 

When  the  rock  was  first  observed,  and  whether  it  then  had 
anything  written  upon  it,  cannot  be  known  from  existing 
records.  All  that  we  can  be  sure  of  is  that  the  Taunton  men 
who  began  cutting  hay  close  by  as  early  as  1640  must  at  least 
have  seen  it.  So  also,  probably,  must  those  who  were  in  charge 
of  a  trading-post  that  was  established  at  a  very  early  date,  pos- 
sibly before  the  settlement  of  Taunton  in  1637,  at  Storehouse 
Point  on  the  Taunton  River. ^  This  Point  has  been  variously 
located  in  Somerset  and  in  Dighton,  but  in  either  case  was 
across  the  river  from  Assonet  Neck.  A  great  many  wholly 
unfounded  statements  have  been  made  and  frequently  accepted 
as  valid  concerning  this  early  period.  Some  of  them  claim  that 
"the  Indians  were  ignorant  of  the  existence"  of  such  inscribed 
rocks ;  or  that  "the  natives  could  not  render  any  account  of  its 

1  Francis  Baylies,  Hist,  of  Plymouth  Colony,  1830,  i.  288,  ii.  272. 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        29 

origin,  when  the  Europeans  discovered  the  country."  Others 
assert  that  "the  rock  was  seen  and  talked  of  by  the  first  set- 
tlers in  New  England,"  or  was  "found  there  on  the  arrival  of 
the  first  New  England  colonists."  These  are  examples  of  mere 
plain  romancing  in  the  interest  of  a  theory.  There  is  nowhere 
on  record  any  testimony  by  Indians  at  all  resembling  the  state- 
ments quoted;  and  it  was  not  until  sixty  years  after  the  Pil- 
grims came  that  anyone  is  known  to  have  noticed  the  rock. 

There  is  a  pedigree  through  Greenwood,  Lort  and  Rafn, 
with  all  of  whom  we  shall  make  acquaintance  in  due  order,  to 
common  knowledge  of  the  fact  that  the  earliest  drawing  and 
description  of  the  rock  were  made  in  1680.  But  these  accounts 
were  incomplete,  and  the  drawing  as  presented  was  not  entirely 
faithful  to  its  original  form.  It  was  told  in  these  sources  that 
this  pioneer  in  petroglyphic  observation  was  the  Rev.  Dr. 
Danforth.  But  there  was  no  Rev.  Dr.  Danforth  in  New  Eng- 
land at  that  time.  Of  the  two  brothers  of  that  name,  John  and 
Samuel,  who  not  long  afterwards  became  clergymen,  neither 
ever  was  entitled  to  be  called  Doctor.  It  has  been  generally 
assumed,  however,  that  the  one  meant  must  have  been  Samuel, 
because  from  1687  for  forty  years  he  was  minister  at  Taunton, 
the  rock  was  at  first  within  his  parish  and  owned  by  one  of  his 
fellow  townsmen,  and  he  had  great  interest  in  the  Indians  and 
compiled  a  vocabulary  of  their  language.  But  in  1680  he  was 
only  thirteen  years  old  and  was  beginning  his  studies  at  Har- 
vard. Only  by  assuming  that  there  was  some  mistake  about 
the  date  as  well  as  another  in  calling  him  Doctor,  could  he  be 
regarded  plausibly  as  author  of  the  drawing. 

In  the  course  of  investigation  it  became  evident  that  there 
was  something  more  to  be  discovered  about  this  mysterious 
"Dr.  Danforth"  than  had  been  told  by  Greenwood,  from  whom 
all  existing  information  derived.  James  Phinney  Baxter  pub- 
lished in  1887  an  extract  from  a  letter  that  he  had  seen  in  the 
British  Museum,  in  which,  without  mention  of  Danforth  or 
Greenwood,  he  quoted  statements  that  had  been  attributed  to 
Danforth  by  Greenwood,  but  with  the  addition  of  a  sentence 
that  the  latter  had  not  given.  Following  this  clue  as  to  the 
existence  of  further  material,  I  secured  transcripts  of  all  per- 


30  DIGHTON  ROCK 

tinent  records  from  the  British  Museum,  the  Royal  Society,  and 
the  Society  of  Antiquaries  of  London.  These  yielded  several 
interesting  results.  They  confirmed  the  year  of  the  drawing 
as  being  actually  1680,  added  the  month  when  it  was  made, 
identified  the  Dan  forth,  and  explained  why  he,  and  Greenwood 
with  him,  had  always  mistakenly  been  called  "Doctor"  in  all 
of  the  Dighton  Rock  literature. 

The  real  draughtsman  of  this  earliest  representation  of  the 
inscription  was  Samuel's  older  brother,  John  Danforth,  who 
became  minister  at  Dorchester  in  1682.  In  1680  he  had  secured 
his  Master  of  Arts  degree  from  Harvard  College  while  in  his 
twentieth  year.  In  the  fall  of  that  year  he  was  evidently  at 
Taunton,  for  in  October  he  went  to  see  the  curiosity  at  Assonet 
Neck,  very  likely  with  James  Walker,  who  had  just  become 
owner  of  the  rock  and  adjoining  land,  or  with  Benjamin  Jones, 
who  in  1695  married  Hannah,  one  of  James  Walker's  daugh- 
ters, and  whom  we  shall  meet  again  shortly.  The  drawing  that 
Danforth  made  was  of  only  a  portion  of  the  inscription,  the 
rest  of  which  may  have  been  covered  by  the  tide  at  the  time  of 
his  visit.  Either  then  or  later  he  wrote  on  a  separate  slip  of 
paper  a  disappointingly  brief  description  to  accompany  the 
drawing.    The  slip  reads  as  follows : 

The  uppermost  of  y^  Engravings  of  a  Rock  in  y^  river  As- 
soonet  six  miles  below  Tanton  in  New  England.  Taken  out  some- 
time in  October  1680.  by  John  Danforth.  It  is  reported  from  the 
Tradition  of  old  Indians,  y*  y*"  came  a  wooden  house,  (&  men  of 
another  country  in  it)  swimming  up  the  river  Asonet,  y*  fought  y* 
Indians  &  slew  y*"  Saunchem.  &c.  Some  recon  the  figures  here  to 
be  Hieroglyphicall.  The  first  figure  representing  a  Ship,  without 
masts,  &  a  meer  Wrack  cast  upon  the  Shoales.  The  second  repre- 
senting an  head  of  Land,  possibly  a  cape  with  a  peninsula.  Hence 
a  Gulf. 

What  are  probably  Dan  forth' s  own  original  drawing  and 
the  accompanying  descriptive  slip  are  preserved  with  a  letter 
from  Greenwood  in  the  British  Museum.  Photostatic  copies  of 
them  are  reproduced  in  Figure  7.  They  are  important  because 
they  give  Danforth's  own  contribution  in  full  and  authentic 
form,  instead  of  in  the  incomplete  and  slightly  altered  manner 


^ 


'^4^^^  ^il^ 


'/ 


9    -P 


,/>  vc/'"t-r 


<>/*<-'  c    c-        .  r.A,-,   .,      '%  c 


-r-**  .6-«. 


<^; 


'C-SKVi 


r,^ 


Fig.  7.    Earliest  drawing  and  description  of  the  Dighton    ock  inscription,  by  Rev.  John  Danforth,  October,  1680 
Between  Images  30-31 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        31 

in  which  Greenwood  reported  it.  The  latter  alone  has  been 
used  heretofore,  and  mistaken  inferences  have  been  drawn  from 
it.  The  sHp  relates  a  tradition  that  we  shall  meet  again  in  a 
somewhat  differing  version,  and  that  has  every  appearance 
of  being  a  genuine  though  vague  reminiscence  of  a  visit  to  the 
neighborhood  by  some  early  explorer.  The  two  "figures"  that 
it  attempts  to  explain  are  evidently  those  at  the  right-hand  end 
of  the  drawing,  where  the  suggested  resemblances  may  be  seen 
easily  but  need  not  be  regarded  as  anything  more  than  mere 
fancies.  There  are  two  additions  by  Greenwood  on  the  slip 
— the  inserted  n  by  which  he  corrected  the  spelling  "Tanton"  to 
"Taunton,"  and  the  "No.  2"  at  the  bottom.  Otherwise  the 
writing  is  probably  Danforth's,  and  it  is  he  who  mistakenly 
speaks  of  the  Assonet  instead  of  the  Taunton  river.  The 
drawing  is  rather  well  executed,  and  we  shall  find  reason  to 
conclude  that  it  is  as  trustworthy  as  any  that  were  made  by 
later  observers,  but  no  more  so.  The  "No.  2"  on  it,  as  well  as 
on  the  slip,  is  Greenwood's.  The  folio  numbers  close  by,  and 
the  stamp  of  the  British  Museum,  are  also  extraneous.  The 
dimensions  of  the  original  drawing  are  2^  by  7f^  inches. 

There  is  another  extraneous  mark  on  the  drawing  that  is  of 
particular  interest  and  that  perhaps  throws  light  upon  the  wan- 
derings of  the  document.  Near  the  left-hand  end  there  is  a 
faintly  drawn  "BI"  that  is  certainly  not  meant  to  represent 
part  of  the  inscription.  The  only  plausible  explanation  of  this 
mark  that  I  can  think  of  is  that  it  constitutes  the  initials  of 
Benjamin  Jones.  Cotton  Mather  published  in  1690  a  drawing 
which  he  unquestionably  copied  from  this  one  by  Danforth; 
and  on  it  he  placed  a  mark  resembling  a  "9"  in  the  position 
corresponding  to  this  "B,"  evidently  mistaking  the  latter  for 
an  integral  part  of  the  drawing,  and  copying  it  imperfectly. 
Later,  Greenwood  obtained  possession  of  both  drawing  and 
slip,  either  before  or  at  the  time  of  his  visit  to  the  rock  in  1730. 
In  making  his  own  copy.  Greenwood  also,  like  Mather,  included 
the  "B,"  but,  unlike  Mather,  he  made  it  faint,  as  it  should  be. 
James  Walker,  in  1690,  deeded  to  his  daughter  Hannah  the 
portion  of  his  property  on  which  the  rock  was  situated.  In 
1695,  she  married  Benjamin  Jones,  and  on  division-stones  be- 


32  DIGHTON  ROCK 

tween  their  own  and  adjoining  lands  they  caused  the  initials 
"BI"  to  be  engraved.  Benjamin  Jones,  dying  in  1720,  left  his 
farm  to  his  son  Benjamin,  who  was  living  there  at  the  time 
of  Greenwood's  visit  in  1730.  All  of  these  facts  can  be  con- 
sistently woven  together  and  the  marks  on  the  drawing  ex- 
plained if  we  make  the  following  assumptions :  that  Danforth, 
attaching  no  great  importance  to  the  documents,  gave  them  to 
Jones,  who  may  have  accompanied  him;  that  Jones  wrote  his 
initials  on  the  drawing;  that  Danforth,  settling  as  minister  at 
Dorchester  in  1682,  talked  with  Cotton  Mather  about  the  inscrip- 
tion; that  Mather,  deeply  interested,  wrote  to  Jones  or  Samuel 
Danforth  and  secured  the  drawing,  copied  it  with  erroneous 
inclusion  of  the  "9,"  and  perhaps  later  returned  it  to  Jones; 
and  that  Jones's  son  presented  both  drawing  and  slip  to  Green- 
wood, although  the  latter  might  equally  well  have  secured  them 
from  either  Mather  or  Danforth,  in  case  the  first  Jones  had 
surrendered  them  permanently  to  either  of  these.  Greenwood, 
as  we  shall  see,  retained  for  a  while  the  original  documents,  but 
sent  to  England  some  quotations  from  the  slip  and  a  copy  of  the 
drawing.  The  latter,  he  stated,  was  "Delineata  per  Dom  Dan- 
forth Anno  1680."  This  "Dom"  was  later  accidentally  tran- 
scribed "Dr."  and  thus  became  responsible  for  subsequent 
misapplication  of  that  title  to  Danforth,  under  circumstances 
that  can  best  be  related  in  connection  with  Greenwood's  own 
contributions. 

Cotton  Mather  became  interested  in  Dighton  Rock,  in  some 
such  way  as  has  just  been  conjectured,  and  wrote  about  it  on 
four  separate  occasions.  The  first  time  was  in  the  Epistle 
Dedicatory  addressed  "To  the  Right  Worshipful  Sir  Henry 
Ashurst,  Baronet,"  which  prefaced  a  sermon  published  early  in 
1690  under  the  title  The  Wonderful  Works  of  God  Com- 
memorated.' He  included  a  drawing  of  what  he  regarded  as 
the  "first  line"  out  of  a  total  of  "about  half  a  score  lines"  of 
the  inscription,  a  few  descriptive  words  of  which  the  more  im- 
portant were  quoted  at  the  beginning  of  our  second  chapter,  and 
an  allusion  to  "what  the  Indian  People  have  Engraved  upon 
Rocks"  which  reveals  his  belief  that  it  was  to  these  people  that 

2  Issued  also  in  a  second  edition,  1703. 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        33 

the  inscription  was  due  and  that  what  they  wrote  is  unintel- 
Hgible.  In  Figure  8  is  given  a  reproduction  of  the  whole.  It 
appears  that  in  his  day  it  was  not  customary  to  make  acknowl- 
edgment of  sources,  nor  does  his  Diary  mention  them.  Con- 
sequently, it  has  never  been  known  whence  he  obtained  the 
drawing  and  description.  But  if  we  compare  his  drawing  of 
this  date,  and  those  of  the  same  part  of  the  inscription  that  he 
published  twice  later,  with  the  Danforth  drawing,  as  plates  in 
my  Colonial  Society  papers  give  opportunity  to  do,  the  possi- 
bility will  suggest  itself  that  the  former  may  have  been  copied 
from  the  latter.  Study  of  the  productions  of  later  artists  will 
convince  us  that  any  two  independent  observers,  and  even  the 
same  observer  at  different  times,  inevitably  make  drawings  that 
differ  markedly  from  one  another  in  important  features.  In 
this  case  there  are  no  such  essential  differences,  but  only  dis- 
tortions. The  suggested  possibility  becomes  a  certainty.  There 
is  no  question  that  Mather  copied  from  Danforth,  and  that  he 
was  a  very  poor  copyist. 

In  the  following  year,  1691,  Mather  again  briefly  referred 
to  the  rock  in  the  following  words :  "Of  the  Indians  Reading 
and  Writing  is  altogether  unknown  to  them,  tho'  there  is  a 
Rock  or  two  in  the  Country  that  has  unaccountable  characters 
Engrav'd  upon  it."^  Afterwards,  he  wrote  no  more  about  it 
for  twenty  years.  He  had  been  industrious,  however,  in  the 
meantime,  in  taking  note  of  everything  that  he  regarded  as  of 
an  extraordinary  nature.  This  suggested  to  him  eventually  an 
idea  which  he  expressed  in  his  Diary  on  July  5,  1711 :  "There 
is  one  good  Interest,  which  I  have  never  yett  served,  and  yett 
I  am  capable  of  doing  some  small  Service  for  it.  The  Improve- 
ment of  Knowledge  in  the  Works  of  Nature,  is  a  Thing  where- 
by God,  and  his  Christ  is  glorified.  I  may  make  a  valuable 
Collection  of  many  Curiosities,  which  this  Countrey  has 
afforded;  and  present  it  unto  the  Royal  Society.  May  the 
glorious  Lord  assist  me,  in  this  Performance."  Acting  upon 
this  resolution,  in  November,  1712,  he  composed  a  series  of 
thirteen  letters  on  the  Natural  History  of  New  England  and 

^Life  of  John  Eliot,  1691,  p.  81. 


34  DIGHTON  ROCK 

kindred  topics,  which  he  sent  to  members  of  the  Royal  Society 
for  communication  to  the  Society.  Excerpts  from  these  were 
printed  in  1714  in  No.  339  of  the  Philosophical  Transactions, 
and  afterwards  incorporated  in  its  Volume  XXIX.  Among 
the  curiosities  of  which  Mather  made  mention,  Dighton  Rock 
was  included.  His  description  of  it  was  written  on  November 
28,  1712,  and  does  not  differ  essentially  from  that  of  1690, 
except  that  now  he  thinks  that  the  inscription  consists  of  seven 
or  eight  lines,  two  of  which  he  presents  in  a  drawing  with  the 
hope  that  "ere  long*'  he  may  be  able  to  obtain  the  rest  of  them ; 
and  he  no  longer  suggests  the  Indians  as  the  engravers,  but 
considers  the  characters  unaccountable,  since  no  one  "knows 
any  more  what  to  make  of  them  than  who  it  was  that  graved 
them."  The  drawing  is  shown  with  approximate  accuracy 
among  those  of  Figure  6.  The  Colonial  Society  papers  present 
it  enlarged  to  about  double  its  original  linear  dimensions,  for 
the  sake  of  better  clarity  and  comparison  with  others. 

The  "first  line''  of  this  drawing  is  evidently  a  copy  from 
that  of  1690  and  hence  from  that  of  Danforth.  The  "second 
line"  corresponds  really  to  very  nearly  all  of  the  remaining  sur- 
face of  the  rock,  below  the  "first  line,"  instead  of  being  only 
a  second  line  out  of  seven  or  eight,  as  Mather  thought  it  was. 
It  has  always  been  a  puzzle,  for  it  bears  not  the  slightest  re- 
semblance to  anything  that  anyone  else  has  depicted  as  occupy- 
ing this  position  on  the  rock.  Like  the  inscription  itself  to 
Mather,  so  to  everyone  else  this  "second  line"  of  his  has  been 
such  a  mystery  that  "no  one  knows  any  more  what  to  make 
of  it  than  who  it  was  that  graved  it."  It  never  occurred  to 
anyone  before,  nor  to  the  writer  until  he  had  puzzled  over  it 
vainly  for  several  years,  to  turn  this  second  line  bottom-side  up. 
When  this  is  done,  although  it  will  be  seen  to  be  a  very  unskilled 
piece  of  work,  its  resemblance  to  later  drawings  will  be  readily 
recognized. 

There  are  several  possibilities  as  to  whence  Mather  pro- 
cured this  second  line.  There  is  no  indication  and  no  prob- 
ability that  he  ever  saw  the  rock  itself.  The  new  drawing  was 
evidently  made  by  some  one  who  had  intimate  knowledge  of 
the  "first  line,"  for  it  is  clearly  designed  as  a  supplement  to  the 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        35 

latter  and  carefully  avoids  repetition  of  its  features.  One  way 
in  which  it  may  have  happened  is  suggested  by  an  entry  of  Feb- 
ruary 24,  1691,  in  the  Letter-Book  of  Samuel  Sewall,  where 
the  latter  reminds  himself  to  write  to  Rev.  Samuel  Danforth 
*'to  take  the  writing  off  the  Rock  and  send  it."  In  carrying 
out  this  purpose,  he  may  have  secured  the  original  Danforth 
drawing  from  Mather  and  returned  it  to  Jones  through  Samuel 
Danforth,  asking  not  for  a  complete  new  drawing  but  only  for 
the  additional  "lines;"  and  it  may  have  been  Jones,  a  farmer 
unskilled  in  drawing,  who  executed  the  commission.  Then, 
years  later,  when  Mather  was  ready  to  write  about  the  rock 
again,  he  may  have  procured  this  new  portion  from  Sewall, 
too  late  to  send  for  the  other  lines  that  he  believed  had  not  yet 
been  copied,  and,  not  knowing  its  correct  position,  added  it 
upside-down  to  what  he  already  had.  This  course  of  events 
would  explain  everything  adequately,  although  there  are  doubt- 
less other  possible  ways  of  doing  it. 

This  communication  of  Mather's  to  the  Royal  Society 
aroused  a  great  deal  of  interest.  One  result  of  this  was  the 
issuance  of  a  small  Broadside,  about  four  by  five  inches  in 
size,  whose  existence  had  been  unnoticed  before  this  research 
was  undertaken.  Two  copies  of  it  are  known,  one  owned  by 
the  Massachusetts  Historical  Society  and  the  other  by  Yale 
University.  They  differ  in  that  in  one  the  cut  of  the  inscrip- 
tion is  printed  below  the  descriptive  matter,  while  in  the  other 
the  position  of  the  two  is  reversed.  It  seems  not  unlikely  that 
Cotton  Mather  himself  was  responsible  for  its  appearance,  in 
order  to  satisfy  the  curiosity  of  his  friends,  and 'that  it  was 
printed  not  far  from  the  time  when  the  account  in  the  Philo- 
sophical Transactions  came  out  in  1714.  Its  cut  is  not  a  direct 
reproduction  from  the  latter,  as  will  be  seen  by  consulting  the 
plate  in  the  Colonial  Society  papers  which  shows  the  three 
Mather  versions  of  the  "first  line"  compared  with  one  another 
and  with  the  Danforth  drawing.  He  probably  retained  a  copy 
of  the  two  lines  for  himself  when  he  wrote  to  the  Royal  So- 
ciety, and  perhaps  for  the  Broadside  made  a  fresh  copy  from 
that ;  and  he  never  copied  well,  nor  twice  alike. 

Further  results  of  the  interest  aroused  by  Mather's  com- 


36  DIGHTON  ROCK 

munication  were  the  publication  by  Daniel  Neal  of  a  quotation 
from  it  in  his  History  of  New  England  in  1720,  and  the  pro- 
duction of  a  new  drawing  and  description  of  the  rock  by  Isaac 
Greenwood  in  1730.  But  Greenwood  was  not  the  only  person 
who  visited  the  rock  at  about  that  same  time  and  copied  its 
inscription.  Two  men  of  considerable  eminence  went  to  see  it, 
who  have  escaped  the  notice  of  previous  writers.  One  of  these 
was  John  Smibert,  one  of  the  earliest  of  American  portrait 
painters.  The  only  allusion  to  the  fact  is  in  an  unpublished 
manuscript  written  by  Pierre  Eugene  du  Simitiere  about  1781. 
He  says:  "There  was  in  the  collection  of  Doctor  [Williams] 
Smibert  at  Boston,  an  accurate  drawing  of  the  Supposed  in- 
scription at  Taunton,  done  by  his  father  John  Smibert  an 
eminent  painter  that  came  over  to  america  with  Dean  Berkeley, 
and  afterwards  Settled  at  Boston."*  If  this  report  is  trust- 
worthy, it  is  much  to  be  regretted  that  search  in  many  directions 
has  thus  far  failed  to  discover  this  important  early  drawing 
by  so  gifted  an  artist.  The  time  of  the  visit  would  probably 
have  been  1 729,  for  it  was  in  January  of  that  year  that  Smibert 
arrived  from  England  at  Newport,  and  he  left  there  for  Boston 
late  in  the  same  year. 

There  are  three  previously  overlooked  evidences  of  a  visit 
by  the  Rev.  George  Berkeley,  then  Dean  of  Derry  but  tem- 
porarily residing  at  Newport,^  afterward  Bishop  of  Cloyne  and 
one  of  the  most  deservedly  eminent  of  English  philosophers. 
One  of  them  is  a  manuscript  note  by  Dr.  Ezra  Stiles,  made  in 
1767,  referring  to  the  inscription  on  Dighton  Rock:  "Was 
taken  off  first  by  Dr.  Cotton  Mather.  Then  by  Professor 
Greenwood. — Lastly  by  Dean  Berkley.  Greenw*^  took  the 
whole;  the  other  two  but  half.  Teste  Benj  Jones  aet.  70  Owner 
of  the  Rock."  This  Benjamin  Jones  was  "Owner  of  the  Rock" 
from  1720  to  1768,  and  was  son  of  the  Benjamin  Jones  of  Dan- 
f orth's  time  and  Mather's.  He  therefore  may  have  personally 
seen  Berkeley  and  Greenwood  as  well  as  Stiles  on  the  occasions 

*  P.  E.  du  Simitiere,  "Inscription  in  Massachusetts";  in  MS  Volume  No. 
1412  Quarto,  Library  Company  of  Philadelphia. 

°  He  arrived  in  Newport  on  January  23,  1729,  and  departed  for  England 
on  September  21,  1731. 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        37 

of  their  several  visits,  but  he  would  have  known  about  Mather 
only  by  hearsay,  and  he  very  evidently  confused  Mather  with 
Danforth.  It  is  very  possible  also  that,  after  nearly  forty  years, 
he  confused  the  order  of  the  visits  of  Berkeley  and  Green- 
wood, and  forgot  Smibert;  for  it  seems  most  likely  that 
Berkeley  and  Smibert,  who  had  come  from  England  together, 
would  also  have  gone  together  to  the  rock  made  famous  by 
Mather,  and  that  the  date  of  this  event  was  1729.  A  certain 
statement  by  Greenwood,  also,  becomes  more  comprehensible 
on  this  assumption. 

The  same  manuscript  by  du  Simitiere  which  is  authority  for 
Smibert's  visit,  speaks  also  of  Berkeley  in  the  following  man- 
ner: 

There  is  a  tradition  very  current  in  New  England,  but  particu- 
larly at  New  Port  that  when  the  learned  Dean  Berkeley  resided 
near  that  last  mentioned  place  ...  he  visited  the  rock  at  Taunton, 
and  had  began  an  Elaborate  dissertation  upon  the  supposed  in- 
scription, when  a  farmer  in  its  neighborhood  .  .  .  informed  him, 
that,  that  rock  had  been  used  formerly  by  the  Indians  that  resorted 
thither  to  Shoot  ducks,  and  dart  fish,  to  wett  [whet]  and  Sharpen 
the  points  of  their  arrows  and  darts  on  that  Stone  which  was  the 
cause  of  the  various  hollow  lines  and  figures  formed  thereon. 

Berkeley's  visit  is  further  attested,  though  with  somewhat 
differing  details,  by  a  reviewer  in  the  English  Review  for 
March,  1790,  on  the  authority  of  "his  ingenious  and  religious 
widow,  the  late  Mrs.  Berkeley."  He  well  remembers  to  have 
been  told  by  her  that  her  husband  "returned  fully  convinced 
that  this  reputed  scrawl  of  the  present  Indians,  this  boasted 
inscription  of  Punick,  of  Phoenician,  or  of  Tartar  hands  was 
merely  the  casual  corrosion  of  the  rock  by  the  waves  of  the 
sea,"  and  with  this  opinion  he,  the  reviewer,  cordially  concurs. 

It  is  unbelievable  that  anyone  who  had  actually  seen  the  rock 
could  possibly  have  considered  the  lines  upon  it  as  having  been 
caused  either  by  casual  corrosion  through  natural  agencies,  or 
accidentally  in  the  process  of  sharpening  weapons.  The  two 
opinions  attributed  to  Berkeley  disagree  with  one  another,  and 
personally  I  do  not  doubt  that  those  who  reported  them  fifty 


38  DIGHTON  ROCK 

years  and  more  after  the  incidents  were  mistaken  about  the 
facts.  We  shall  study  by  and  by  some  marks  on  rocks  at 
Purgatory,  near  Newport  and  near  Berkeley's  home,  which 
were  actually  made  by  Indians  in  sharpening  and  shaping  their 
stone  implements.  It  must  have  been  there,  at  Purgatory,  that 
he  was  given  this  correct  explanation  of  its  marks  by  a  "farmer 
of  the  neighborhood;"  and,  much  later,  the  traditions  lingering 
at  Newport  concerning  this  opinion  and  also  his  visit  to  Digh- 
ton  Rock,  easily  confused  the  two.  What  kind  of  confusion 
accounts  for  the  other  report,  that  he  saw  nothing  on  the  rock 
except  the  results  of  natural  processes,  cannot  be  exactly  traced. 
But  this  view  has  been  suggested  not  infrequently  by  persons 
who  had  never  seen  the  rock,  and  somehow  or  other,  in  the 
course  of  sixty  years,  Mrs.  Berkeley  seems  to  have  become 
convinced  that  it  was  her  husband's  belief.  As  to  the  fact  of 
his  visit,  however,  there  seems  to  be  no  question,  since  there 
are  three  independent  evidences  of  it — the  personal  knowledge 
of  Benjamin  Jones,  the  tradition  preserved  at  Newport,  and  the 
memory  of  Mrs.  Berkeley. 

Isaac  Greenwood  was  "Hollisian  Professor  of  y®  Mathe- 
maticks  and  Philosophy''  at  Harvard  College  from  1727  to 
1738.  He  seems  to  have  been  a  picturesque  character,  inclining 
to  extravagance  in  the  purchase  of  neckties  and  the  like,  and  to 
a  rather  indiscreet  intimacy  with  John  Barleycorn,  yet  regarded 
by  Cotton  Mather  as  "a  sort  of  a  son."^  He  is  the  source  of 
our  earliest  detailed  information  concerning  Dighton  Rock, 
but  there  has  always  been  a  puzzling  degree  of  confusion  con- 
cerning his  contributions.  These  were  first  reported  to  the 
world  by  Lort  in  1787,  nearly  sixty  years  after  they  were 
written.  But  little  items  of  additional  or  conflicting  informa- 
tion were  available  here  and  there,  and  suggested  a  fresh 
search  for  the  original  documents  and  the  true  history  of  them. 
Manuscripts  preserved  in  the  British  Museum  and  records  of 
the  Royal  Society  and  of  the  Society  of  Antiquaries  of  Lon- 
don, more  exhaustively  examined  and  compared  than  had 
been  done  before,  made  it  possible  to  completely  straighten  out 

6  Diary,  ii.  741 ;  July  15,  1724. 


■"!{  your  Ac ceptanc*  c!  r;;em,  as  a  part  of  our  Ac- 
kaowled-gtrifnti.      Amonz   car    ct!ir-r  C.^ii..,2(i's  of 

radicular  f:i.w-cr..,f  by  n  Rlv=^  uhich  ^  Hig" 
Tide  covtfS^  prt  of  ir,  tb^re  src  vcrv  defolv  Fr»-av- 

iccrc  ZM-j,  -ifar  Te-  Poor  i.j;;^,  3^^  ,  f:,„j  „j   .   ,t 


1/ie  Lpifrlc  Dedicatory. 

C  g.5e(?  as  did  ri.-»'jirs  afioit  them  tliat  were  bfre Is 
fore  us,  as  there  arc  ^.U '.jtjpc,  in  ih,u  Klaoorate  Mo- 
numrnr,  \v!:crcjf  you  Ihall  ice,  i\k  fn}  lue  Tun- 
Ccnbid  llete.^ 


Fig.  8.     Earliest  printed  drawing  and 

description  of  Dighton  Rock,  liy  Rev. 

Cotton    Afather,    D.D.,    1690 

Faciiu/  page  3S 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        39 

the  confusion  and  to  work  out  the  following  account  of  the 
actual  facts. 

Sometime  before  September,  1730,  Professor  Greenwood 
received  from  Mr.  John  Eames,  a  Fellow  of  the  Royal  Society, 
a  letter  stating  that  some  of  the  members  of  that  Society,  in- 
terested by  Cotton  Mather's  description  in  the  Philosophical 
Transactions  of  1714,  wished  to  secure  a  new  copy  of  the  in- 
scription on  the  rock  in  Taunton  River.  Accordingly,  Green- 
wood visited  the  rock  in  September,  1730,  and  copied  its  in- 
scription. He  either  had  already  in  his  possession,  or  more 
probably  now  secured  from  Benjamin  Jones,  the  two  papers 
that  contain  Danforth's  original  drawing  of  1680  and  his 
descriptive  comments.  The  two  drawings,  his  own  and  Dan- 
forth's, he  copied  onto  one  sheet  of  paper;  and  he  also  com- 
posed a  letter  in  reply  to  Eames.  This  letter  was  at  first  a 
rough  draft  only,  with  numerous  corrections,  erasures,  and 
interlineations;  and  in  this  form  I  refer  to  it  as  Letter  B,  Of 
this  he  then  made  a  fair  copy  (Letter  A),  differing  very  slightly 
in  content  from  the  corrected  original,  markedly  better  in  its 
handwriting  and  spelling,  and  containing  most,  but  not  all,  of 
the  contents  of  the  "Danforth  descriptive  slip"  in  a  postscript. 
This  fair  copy.  Letter  A,  and  the  copy  of  the  drawings  he  sent 
to  Eames  under  date  of  December  8,  1730;  retaining  in  his 
own  possession  the  original  draft,  the  two  original  drawings, 
and  the  Dan  forth  slip. 

In  April,  1732,  he  learned  from  Eames  that  the  latter  had 
never  received  a  reply  to  his  previous  letter  with  its  request  for 
a  new  drawing.  There  being  a  ship  about  to  sail  immediately, 
Greenwood,  with  no  time  to  make  another  copy,  put  together 
the  original  rough  draft  of  his  letter,  the  two  original  and 
separate  drawings,  and  the  Dan  forth  slip,  together  constituting 
what  I  call  Letter  B.  This  bears  the  original  date  of  December 
8,  1730,  but  was  sent  to  Eames,  with  a  brief  and  hurried  letter 
of  explanation  (Letter  C),  on  April  28,  1732. 

Letters  B  and  C  arrived  in  London  on  June  5,  were  received 
by  Eames,  and  were  presented  by  him  to  the  Royal  Society  on 
June  15,  1732.  On  the  same  day  they  were  copied,  including 
the  drawings,  into  the  Register  Book  of  the  Society,     The 


40  DIGHTON  ROCK 

original  documents  eventually  passed  into  Birch's  collection  of 
manuscripts,  and  by  1782  they  were,  as  they  now  are,  in  the 
British  Museum.  Lort,  prosecuting  what  he  intended  to  be  a 
thorough  search  of  the  records  of  the  Royal  Society,  in  1786, 
failed  to  discover  either  the  copied  documents  in  the  Society's 
Register  Book,  or  the  originals  in  the  British  Museum.  By 
early  November  of  the  same  year.  Letter  A  also  arrived  at  its 
destination.  Eames  seems  to  have  thought  that  it  would  be 
of  interest  to  the  Society  of  Antiquaries  of  London ;  for  it  was 
presented  before  that  Society  on  November  9  by  Mr.  Bogdani, 
to  whom  it  appears  to  have  been  transmitted  through  the  Rev. 
Mr.  Villers.  A  portion  of  the  letter,  and  the  drawings,  were 
copied  into  the  Minutes  of  the  Society,  and  it  was  this  frag- 
mentary account  which  Lort  found  in  1786,  and  from  which 
very  nearly  all  of  previous  statements  concerning  Danforth  and 
Greenwood  have  been  drawn.  The  letter  itself  apparently  came 
into  the  possession  of  the  Rev.  William  Cole,  who  bequeathed 
the  volumes  in  which  it  is  contained  to  the  British  Museum 
in  1783. 

One  of  the  remarkable  facts  illustrative  of  the  inadequacies 
of  previous  investigation  is  that  no  one  ever  reported  the  full 
contents  of  the  Danforth  slip,  and  no  one  correctly  named  the 
correspondent  to  whom  Greenwood  addressed  his  letters.  The 
"Minutes"  recorded  the  latter  as  Viller,  and  Lort  misread  this 
as  Villan ;  and  in  neither  form  is  the  name  correct,  for  the  con- 
temporary Historical  Register  speaks  of  this  man  as  Rev.  Dr. 
Villers,  while  the  parochial  records  give  his  name  as  John  Villa. 
One  recent  investigator  asserted  wrongly  that  the  correspondent 
was  Sir  Hans  Sloane,  and  another  that  he  was  Mr.  John 
Evanses.  The  address  that  is  still  on  one  of  the  letters  proves 
that  all  of  them  were  really  addressed  to  John  Eames. 

Letter  A  was  about  twenty-three  months  in  passage,  but 
the  combined  Letters  B  and  C  took  only  thirty-eight  days  and 
arrived  first.  This  irregularity  seems  to  have  been  not  unusual. 
Dean  Berkeley,  in  1730,  wrote  from  Newport  to  one  of  his 
correspondents:  "Letters  are  of  uncertain  passage:  your  last 
was  half  a  year  in  coming,  and  I  have  had  some  a  year  after 
their  date,  though  often  in  two  or  three  months,  and  some- 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        41 

times  less;"  and  again  he  speaks  of  receiving  a  packet  from 
Dublin  by  way  of  Philadelphia,  "the  postage  whereof  amounted 
to  above  four  pounds  of  this  country  money."^  This  probably 
also  helps  to  explain  certain  marks  apparently  made  by  the 
postal  authorities  on  the  back  of  the  packet  B-C,  which  seem 
to  indicate  that  it  weighed  one  ounce,  and  that  eleven  shilling? 
five  pence  were  charged  for  postage.  Greenwood  intended  to 
send  the  letter,  as  was  usual,  in  charge  of  the  ship's  captain  and 
to  have  him  mail  it  in  the  Penny  Post  in  London,  in  which 
case  it  would  have  cost  but  one  penny.  The  legal  route  estab- 
lished by  the  British  Post  Office  from  Boston  was  via  New 
York,  at  the  rate  of  eight  shillings  an  ounce.  But  there  were 
actually  no  mail  packets  from  New  York  at  the  time.  If 
Greenwood  missed  the  ship  which,  as  he  remarked  in  his  Letter 
C,  was  "immediately  to  sail"  and  which  did  clear  for  London 
on  April  29,  his  letter  may  have  gone  by  way  of  Philadelphia, 
as  one  that  Berkeley  mentioned  did,  and  thus  been  charged  a 
higher  rate  for  postage;  although  perhaps  the  short  time  of 
passage  precludes  this  possibility. 

Letter  A  contains  Greenwood's  copies  of  his  own  drawing 
and  Danforth's.  These  have  usually  been  presented  after  many 
copyings — from  the  letter  to  the  "Minutes,"  thence  by  Lort, 
and  thence  by  others.  In  1908,  however,  David  I.  Bushnell 
published  an  accurate  photographic  reproduction  of  them,®  and 
they  are  again  shown  among  my  Colonial  Society  plates  from 
a  photostatic  copy  made  in  the  British  Museum.  Our  Figure  6 
shows  them  with  sufficient  accuracy.  Underneath  them  Green- 
wood wrote  that  they  were  "Delineata  per  Dom  Greenwood" 
and  "per  Dom  Danforth."  This  "Dom"  evidently  means 
Dominus ;  but  it  was  copied  into  the  Minutes  of  the  Society  of 
Antiquaries  as  "Dr."  Since  this,  through  Lort,  has  been  the 
source  of  all  later  statements  about  these  two  men  in  the  liter- 
ature of  Dighton  Rock,  it  is  easy  to  see  why  they  have  always 
been  mistakenly  spoken  of  as  Dr.  Danforth  and  Dr.  Green- 
wood.   The  significance  of  the  Dominus  is  thus  explained  by 

7  The  Works  of  George  Berkeley,  D.D.  London,  1820.  Vol.  1,  pp. 
xxxix,  xli. 

^  Amer.  Anthropologist,  x.  251. 


42  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Albert  Matthews :  "On  taking  his  first  degree,  or  A.B.,  [at 
Harvard  College]  a  student  was,  following  the  practice  at 
English  universities,  called  'Dominus'  or  'Sir,'  the  latter  desig- 
nation remaining  in  use  down  to  the  first  decade  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  On  taking  his  second  degree,  or  A.M.,  the 
quondam  student  was  called  'Mr.'  "^  Until  he  received  his  first 
degree,  he  was  called  by  his  surname  only.  Danforth  had  both 
degrees,  and  while  Greenwood  calls  him  Dominus  on  the  draw- 
ing, in  the  text  of  the  letter  he  speaks  of  him  as  "Mr.," — ^that 
is,  as  possessed  of  the  Master  of  Arts  degree. 

Letter  B  contains  the  drawings  from  which  Greenwood 
made  his  copies  for  Letter  A,  and  it  is  not  unlikely  that  they 
are  the  original  drawings  of  Danforth  and  Greenwood.  That 
by  Danforth,  together  with  its  accompanying  "slip,"  was  shown 
in  Figure  7.  Greenwood's  is  not  reproduced  here,  since  it  does 
not  differ  from  that  of  letter  A  sufficiently  to  be  of  any  addi- 
tional interest.  Underneath  it  is  written  the  statement  that 
it  was  made  in  September,  1730.  In  either  form,  the  drawing 
is  incomplete,  poorly  made,  with  weak  rounded  lines,  and  of 
little  use  except  as  an  exhibit  illustrating  the  psychological 
features  of  our  discussion. 

Since  Greenwood's  communication  contains  the  first  real 
description  of  Dighton  Rock,  it  seems  worth  while  to  reproduce 
it  here  in  full.  The  version  given  is  that  of  the  more  finished 
Letter  A,  transcribed  from  photostatic  copies  of  the  manu- 
script in  the  British  Museum. 

N.E.  Cambr.  Decem'"  8.  1730 

I  have  according  to  the  desire  of  some  of  the  Members  of  the 
Hon'''^  the  Roy'  Society,  which  you  mention'd  to  me  in  your  last, 
examin'd  the  remarkable  Inscript",  on  the  Rock  in  Taunton  River 
describ'd  in  the  Phil.  Trans.  N°.  339  pa.  70  and  herewith  send  a 
View  of  as  much  of  it  as  I  could  then  possibly  take.    N°  I. 

ABCDE  represent  the  face  thereof,  being  a  Plane  nearly  per- 
pendicular to  the  Horizon,  looking  N  b  W  in  length  from  B  to  D 
lly2  feet,  and  in  Depth  from  C  to  F  4^.  This  seems  to  have  been 
left  by  Nature  very  smooth  &  is  certainly  in  its  substance  very  uni- 
form, compact  and  durable.     BCD  represents  the  surface  of  the 

^  Publicattons  Colonial  Soc.  of  Mass.,  xviii.  309. 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        43 

Water  at  the  time  of  Observation.  I  am  inform'd  that  at  some 
extraordinary  Tides  the  Water  ebbs  below  the  Rock  &  some  of 
undoubted  Veracity  belonging  to  the  town  assured  me,  that  the 
River  has  been  constantly  encroaching  on  that  part  of  the  Beach, 
so  as  to  waste  the  adjacent  Lands,  which  since  the  Memory  of 
many  alive  is  something  more  distant  from  the  Rock  than  formerly, 
tho'  now  but  a  few  feet,  and  that  there  are  the  like  figures  for  some 
feet  under  AE  which  is  the  present  Surface  of  the  Beach. 

In  determining  the  Characters  or  Figures  I  found  some  dif- 
ficulty for  the  Indentures  are  not  at  present  very  considerable,  nor 
I  think  equally  deep,  which  put  me  upon  the  following  Rule  viz*. 
Carefully  to  trace  out  and  Chalk  all  such  places  and  those  only 
which  I  beleived  were  real  Indentures,  and  in  this  part  I  desired 
the  Revisal  &  assistance  of  the  Rev''.  M""  Fisher  &  others.  Many 
places  were  passed  over  which  did  not  seem  to  be  indented,  as  to 
the  Eye,  tho'  remarkably  discolour'd,  by  some  adherent  matter,  in 
corresponding  figures  to  the  rest.  I  thought  it  more  advisable  to 
give  such  parts  of  these  Characters  as  were  real,  that  thereby  the 
whole  might  be  obtained;  than  to  run  the  Risq  of  a  conjectural 
Description,  which  would  certainly  endanger  the  discovery  of  many 
parts,  and  for  this  reason  I  must  also  note,  that  the  figures  are  not 
all  so  well  defin'd  as  I  have  express'd  them,  the  Bounds  being 
scarcely  perceivable  in  some  of  them.  The  Stroakes  also  may  be 
something,  tho'  very  little  broader;  their  Direction  being  what  I 
cheifly  aimed  at.  Time  is  suppos'd  gradually  to  have  impair'd 
theni,  and  one  of  advanced  Years  in  the  Town  told  me  he  was 
sensible  of  some  Alteration  since  his  Memory.  And  for  this  reason 
I  have  also  sent  you  N".  II  which  is  a  Draught  of  some  part  of 
this  Inscription  taken  by  the  Rev^.  M*".  Danforth  1680.  This 
Gentleman  observes  with  relation  to  it,  that  there  was  a  Tradition 
current  among  the  eldest  Indians  "That  there  came  a  wooden  house 
(and  men  of  another  Country  in  it)  swimming  up  the  River  of 
Assoonet  (as  this  was  then  called)  who  fought  the  Indians  with 
mighty  Success  &c."  This  I  think  evidently  shews  that  this  Monu- 
ment was  esteem'd  by  the  oldest  Indians  not  only  very  antique, 
but  a  work  of  a  difif*.  Nature  from  any  of  theirs.  It  may  not  be 
improper  to  add  here  that  this  place  was  one  of  the  most  consider- 
able Seats  of  Indians  in  this  part  of  the  World,  and  tire  River 
remarkable  for  all  Sorts  of  Fowl  &  Fish. 

After  this  description  you  may  expect  an  Accompt  of  the  Senti- 
ments of  some  among  us  relating  to  this  Inscription.    Such  as  look 


44  DIGHTON  ROCK 

upon  it  as  the  work  of  the  Nature  are  little  acquainted  with  her 
Operations  and  have  made  but  a  cursory  Observation  hereof. 
Two  Opinions  prevail  most.  1^*.  That  these  figures  are  the  unde- 
signing  and  artless  Impressions  of  some  of  the  Natives,  out  of 
meer  curiosity  or  for  some  particular  Use.  2'^.  That  they  are  a 
Memorial  in  proper  Sculpture  of  some  remarkable  Transactions  or 
Accident. 

That  they  are  not  the  Effect  of  mere  Curiosity  I  think  is  very 
evident,  for  P'.  the  Natives  of  this  Country  were  altogether  ig- 
norant of  Sculpture  &  the  use  of  Iron.  And  tho'  they  had  some 
Stone  Instruments,  none  that  ever  I  have  seen  are  capable  (in 
much  better  hands  than  theirs)  of  forming  so  accurate  an  Inscrip- 
tion, and  if  they  were,  2'y.  it  is  highly  probable  there  would  have 
been  in  the  Neighbourhood  or  in  some  other  parts  of  New  England 
other  Sketches  of  the  same  or  a  like  Nature  &  Regularity  which 
cannot  be  pretended.  3'^.  One  would  think  their  Curiosity  would 
have  lead  them  to  the  Representation  of  Birds,  Beasts,  Fishes, 
Trees  &c  which  we  have  since  found  to  be  their  prevailing  Genius, 
&  not  to  figures  quite  different  from  the  Objects  of  their  Senses. 
4'y.  They  were  a  Nation  too  idle  &  irresolute  for  a  work  of  so 
much  Industry  &  apparent  Design. 

Some  think  these  Sculptures  were  of  particular  Use  to  the 
Natives  in  sharpning  the  Heads  of  their  Arrows,  their  Axes  &c 
or  at  least  that  they  were  first  form'd  by  such  means.  This  is 
obviated  by  two  Considerations  P*.  that  there  are  no  more  (as  I 
can  yet  hear)  of  such  indented  Rocks.  If  this  was  their  usual 
Custom,  we  should  find  these  Traces  &  Indentures  very  probably 
on  many  Rocks  of  the  same  Nature  as  this ;  and  if  it  was  political 
(a  customary  preparation  to  confirm  &  encourage  one  another  in 
their  Intention  or  prosecution  of  War)  no  doubt  but  kindred  & 
confederate  Tribes  would  have  had  their  respective  Standards. 
But  2'y.  The  figures  are  too  regular  &  uniform  to  comport  with 
such  an  Occasion. 

And  this  brings  me  to  the  second  Opinion  viz*.  That  these 
figures  are  a  Memorial  in  proper  Sculpture  of  some  remarkable 
Transaction  or  Accident  which  appears  from  the  great  Number 
thereof,  from  the  likeness  of  several,  from  the  Parallelism  &  Con- 
formity of  the  Stroakes  one  with  another  in  each,  from  the  Circum- 
stances of  the  Rock  and  Place,  which  are  very  proper  for  such  a 
design,  and  from  the  equal  Irregularity  of  some  of  the  Oriental 
Characters  &c.    But  for  the  farther  Discovery  of  this  our  Hopes 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        45 

being  placed  upon  the  extraordinary  Skill  and  Ingenuity  of  M'- 
La  Croze  in  the  Alphabet  both  ancient  &  modern  of  the  Oriental 
Tongues,  it  is  with  pleasure  I  now  take  leave  of  this  Subject. 

If  it  should  be  thought  proper  to  prosecute  the  Subject  any 
farther  I  will  endeavour  to  transmit  unto  the  Society  a  large  View 
of  the  whole  Inscription,  with  an  Acco*.  of  some  other  Sculptures, 
which  probably  were  the  work  of  some  modern  Indians.  And  this 
I  esteem  but  a  just  Debt  to  that  illustrious  Body,  who  have  im- 
provd  in  so  eminent  a  manner  every  Branch  of  humane  Literature. 

I  am  &c 

Isaac  Greenwood 
Hollesian  Professor  at 
N.  Cambridge. 

To  the  end  of  this  letter  a  short  postscript  was  added,  quot- 
ing a  portion  of  the  Danforth  slip.  There  are  many  things  in 
the  letter  that  are  of  no  value  as  statements  of  fact  or  as  ex- 
amples of  sound  reasoning.  Such  claims  as  that,  within  the 
memory  of  individuals,  the  river  has  encroached  upon  the  land 
or  the  marks  upon  the  rock  have  grown  perceptibly  fainter,  are 
proven  by  completer  evidence  than  Greenwood  possessed  to 
have  no  foundation  in  fact.  The  conclusion  that  he  draws  from 
Danforth's  tradition  about  the  wooden  house  is  unwarranted, 
for  the  tradition  has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  the  question 
as  to  whether  or  not  the  Indians  made  the  carvings  or  knew 
anything  about  their  meaning.  We  shall  find  a  better  hypoth- 
esis than  Greenwood's  about  the  significance  of  the  inscrip- 
tion and  the  relation  of  the  Indians  to  it;  yet  his  mistaken 
deductions  have  been  the  basis  of  many  later  positive  but 
unfounded  assertions  about  the  matter.  His  later  arguments 
against  the  possibility  that  Indians  could  have  done  the  work 
are  not  convincing.  His  method  of  preparing  for  his  drawing 
by  first  chalking  upon  the  rock  what  he  believed  to  be  real 
indentures  has  been  followed  by  almost  every  draughtsman 
and  photographer  since,  but  it  inevitably  leads  to  error.  In 
spite  of  these  inadequacies,  however,  the  letter  is  very  valuable 
for  several  reasons.  It  has  been  the  means  of  preserving  for  us 
Danforth's  drawing,  and  the  contents  of  his  descriptive  slip. 
It  proves  conclusively  what  is  already  suggested  by  the  earlier 


46  DIGHTON  ROCK 

drawings  of  Danforth  and  Mather,  that  from  the  very  first  of 
known  observation  there  has  been  "difficulty  in  determining 
the  characters,"  the  indentures  being  "not  very  considerable," 
the  figures  "not  well  defined,"  and  the  "bounds  scarcely  per- 
ceivable in  some  of  them."  There  is  certainly  no  greater  diffi- 
culty today,  after  two  hundred  and  fifty  years,  and  hence  there 
cannot  have  been  any  very  marked  wear  with  consequent  in- 
crease in  faintness. 

A  further  service  rendered  by  Greenwood  lies  in  his  dis- 
cussion of  opinions,  which  probably  reflects  well  the  course  of 
general  conjecture  up  to  his  time.  Mather  at  first,  and  prob- 
ably Danforth,  thought  of  it  only  as  the  work  of  Indians.  But 
Mather  seems  to  have  given  up  this  view  as  a  consequence  of 
current  criticism,  and  regarded  the  characters  as  "unaccount- 
able." Gradually  the  arguments  against  the  Indians  became 
accepted  as  conclusive,  and  probably  most  of  the  scholars  of 
the  day,  interested  in  the  possibility  that  the  Indians  were 
descendants  of  the  "lost  tribes  of  Israel,"  inclined  to  the  opinion 
that  seems  to  have  been  Greenwood's  own,  that  the  inscription 
was  in  "Oriental  Characters,"  and  might  yet  be  deciphered  as 
such.  He  indicates,  however,  that  two  other  opinions  were 
current  to  some  degree — ^that  the  lines  upon  the  rock  were  the 
work  of  Nature  only,  or  that  they  were  accidental  results  of  the 
work  of  Indians  in  sharpening  arrow-heads.  The  latter  theory, 
it  seems  to  me,  can  have  arisen  only  as  a  result  of  a  transfer 
to  a  wrong  locality  of  Berkeley's  observations  at  Purgatory, 
and  this  is  why  I  have  suggested  the  probability  that,  contrary 
to  the  statement  of  Dr.  Stiles,  Berkeley's  visit  to  the  rock 
occurred  before  that  of  Greenwood;  for  in  that  case  it  would 
have  been  easy  for  Jones  to  have  related  to  Greenwood  a  gar- 
bled account  of  Berkeley's  comments.  The  "work  of  Nature" 
hypothesis  may  well  have  been  current  anywhere,  among 
skeptics  who  had  never  seen  the  rock  itself.  A  final  fact  worth 
noticing  is  that,  although  Greenwood  knew  of  "no  more  of 
such  indented  Rocks,"  yet  he  did  believe  that  the  "modern 
Indians"  of  his  day,  if  not  their  predecessors,  were  engaged 
in  making  occasional  sculptures. 

We  have  thus  gathered  a  rather   gratifying  amount  of 


EARLY  INTEREST  IN  DIGHTON  ROCK        47 

information  concerning  the  rock  during  the  first  hundred  years 
of  its  history  after  white  men  settled  in  its  vicinity.  EarHer 
accounts  of  this  period  have  been  meager  and  distorted.  It  will 
be  instructive  and  encouraging  to  review  how  much  of  definite 
knowledge  it  has  been  possible  to  add  to  what  had  been  told 
before  through  undertaking  a  fresh  and  exhaustive  inquiry. 
Concerning  the  rock  itself,  its  exact  character  and  dimensions 
have  been  determined,  and  various  erroneous  reports  about  it 
corrected.  Its  rate  of  wear  is  slow,  and  the  legibility  of  its 
inscription  has  not  diminished  perceptibly  within  the  last  two 
hundred  and  fifty  years.  The  worn  appearance  that  it  presents 
may  have  been  acquired  within  a  few  decades  after  it  was 
made,  and  throws  no  light  upon  its  age.  The  rock  must  have 
been  seen  as  early  as  1640,  but  there  are  no  reports  about  it 
until  forty  years  later,  and  consequently,  so  far  as  records 
show,  the  work  upon  it  could  have  been  done,  partly  or  wholly, 
within  that  time.  Statements  that  it  was  a  mystery  to  the 
Indians,  or  that  it  was  reported  and  discussed  by  the  earliest 
colonists,  are  without  foundation.  John  Dan  forth,  and  not  his 
brother  Samuel,  made  the  first  drawing  of  it,  in  the  month  of 
October,  1680.  His  original  drawing  has  been  discovered  and 
published,  and  also  the  full  contents  of  his  descriptive  notes. 
The  title  "Doctor,"  always  applied  to  him  and  Greenwood,  has 
been  withdrawn  and  the  reason  for  its  previous  use  explained. 
Something  new  is  known  concerning  every  one  of  Mather's 
contributions:  that  of  1690  was  derived  from  Danforth;  that 
of  1691  is  noticed  for  the  first  time  in  the  literature  of  the 
rock;  the  lower  part  of  the  1712  drawing  was  published  upside- 
down  ;  and  the  Broadside  has  been  discovered.  Samuel  Sewall 
was  interested  in  the  rock  in  1691.  The  rock  was  visited,  prob- 
ably in  1729,  by  John  Smibert  and  Dean  Berkeley.  The  draw- 
ing that  Smibert  made  seems  to  have  disappeared  completely. 
The  opinions  attributed  to  Berkeley  are  conflicting,  and  can  be 
given  a  more  probable  application  to  other  rocks.  Green- 
wood's visit  was  in  the  month  of  September,  1730,  and  the 
correspondent  to  whom  he  addressed  his  letters  was  John 
Eames.  Much  confusion  in  the  reports  about  these  letters  has 
been  cleared  up,  the  main  letter  has  been  given  in  a  reliable  ver- 


48  DIGHTON  ROCK 

sion,  and  it  has  been  interpreted  in  such  a  manner  as  to  reveal 
its  true  significance.  These  are  the  chief,  but  not  the  only  new 
contributions  affecting  this  period.  They  are  enough  to  justify 
us  in  anticipating  similar  increase  in  our  understanding  of  the 
rock  as  we  pursue  our  study  of  it  further. 


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CHAPTER  IV 

A   RECORD   OF   PHCENICIAN   ADVENTURE 

During  the  earliest  period  of  interest  in  Dighton  Rock  and 
its  strange  writing,  there  seem  to  have  been  some,  as  Professor 
Greenwood  implied  in  1730,  who  suspected  that  possibly  its 
characters  were  Oriental.  This  belief  was  doubtless  closely 
connected  with  the  many  current  theories  as  to  the  origin  of 
the  American  Indians, — a  problem  which  aroused  interested 
discussion  from  almost  the  very  earliest  days  of  the  colonies. 
On  the  one  hand,  northwestern  Europe  was  looked  upon  by 
some  as  the  home-land  of  some  at  least  of  the  Indian  tribes. 
But  even  more  widely  accepted  as  parents  of  the  aborigines 
were  Orientals,  either  from  the  eastern  parts  of  Asia,  such  as 
the  Siberian  Tartars,  the  Chinese,  or  the  Japanese,  or  from  its 
western  borders,  such  as  the  Lost  Tribes  of  Israel,  the  sea- 
faring Phoenicians,  or  even  the  exiled  Trojans.  It  was  natural 
that,  when  this  rock  became  known,  some  of  the  advocates  of 
one  theory  or  another  should  find  in  its  curious  characters  evi- 
dence in  favor  of  their  views.  But  up  to  this  time  no  very 
definite  theory  concerning  the  origin  of  the  inscription  had 
taken  shape.  During  the  next  following  one  hundred  years 
after  Greenwood,  it  became  generally  held  that  some  ancient 
people  of  Oriental  origin  carved  this  monument,  or  that  the 
Indians  did  it  in  a  writing  retained  from  their  Oriental  ances- 
tors. Several  theories  ascribing  it  to  different  Oriental  sources 
were  announced.  Some  of  them  went  so  far  as  to  discover  a 
definite  meaning  for  nearly  every  line  upon  the  rock.  Yet 
there  continued  an  undercurrent  of  opposition  to  such  specula- 
tions, and  a  belief  that  either  the  American  Indians  in  a  man- 
ner of  their  own,  or  even  the  action  of  natural  forces  alone, 
were  responsible  for  the  markings. 

Greenwood's  contribution  did  not  satisfy  his  correspond- 

49 


50  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ents,  and  consequently  remained  buried  from  sight  for  over 
fifty  years.  After  his  retirement  from  the  HolHs  Professor- 
ship at  Harvard  in  1738,  John  Winthrop  was  appointed  in  his 
place;  and  Eames,  "at  the  desire  of  a  gentleman  at  Berlin,"  re- 
quested Mr.  Timothy  Hollis  to  secure  through  Winthrop  a 
more  accurate  copy  of  the  inscription.  It  is  said  that  John 
Winthrop  was  the  foremost  teacher  of  science  in  this  country 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  and  that  the  growth  of  the  scientific 
spirit  in  America  owes  much  to  his  influence.  It  is  easy  to 
understand,  therefore,  that  when  he  visited  the  rock  in  answer 
to  this  request,  in  1744  or  earlier,  he  must  have  realized  the 
nearly  insuperable  difficulty  of  determining  what  had  been 
engraved  upon  it,  and  so  he  made  only  a  rough  and  incomplete 
sketch  and  did  not  preserve  it.  It  was  not  until  thirty  years 
later  that  he  complied  with  HoUis's  request  by  sending  him  a 
new  drawing  by  another  man. 

In  1747,  William  Douglass,  a  Boston  physician  of  violent 
prejudices  and  undisciplined  utterance,  published  an  intem- 
perate criticism  ridiculing  Mather  and  his  communication  to 
the  Royal  Society  and  claiming  that  the  ebbing  and  flowing  of 
the  tide  had  made  the  marks  upon  Dighton  Rock,  as  "a  sort 
of  vermoulure,  honey-combing  or  etching  on  its  face."  Except 
historically,  his  contribution  was  as  unimportant  as  was  Cot- 
ton Mather's  own.  The  one  distorts  and  misrepresents  the  ap- 
pearance of  the  inscription,  the  other  tells  us  that  there  is  no 
inscription  there;  and  neither  of  these  men,  apparently,  had 
made  a  personal  inspection  of  the  rock.  Yet  until  1781  their 
accounts  remained  all  that  there  was  in  print  on  this  subject. 

According  to  Kendall,  the  most  active  attention  to  Dighton 
Rock  after  Greenwood  was  occasioned  by  motives  of  greed 
rather  than  of  scholarly  research.  "The  unlearned  believe  that 
the  rock  was  sculptured  by  order  of  a  pirate,"  he  says,  "either 
Captain  Kyd  or  Captain  Blackbeard,  in  order  to  mark  the  site 
of  buried  treasure ;"  and  in  the  search  for  it,  in  the  years  around 
1765  according  to  his  reckoning,  much  labor  was  expended  in 
digging  up  the  shore  for  more  than  a  hundred  fathom  on  a 
side. 

The  fact  that  Dr.  Ezra  Stiles  expressed  certain  opinions 


RECORD  OF  PHGENICIAN  ADVENTURE        51 

concerning  Dighton  Rock  in  an  Election  Sermon  in  1783  is 
well  known.  But  that  he  made  three  separate  drawings  in 
1767,  and  another  in  1788,  is  never  mentioned  in  the  literature 
of  the  subject.  In  all  the  history  of  the  rock,  perhaps  noth- 
ing is  more  surprising  than  this  almost  complete  ignoring  of 
his  important  and  repeated  investigations.  From  1755  to  1776 
he  was  minister  at  Newport.  After  a  brief  residence  at  Digh- 
ton and  at  Portsmouth,  New  Hampshire,  during  the  war,  he 
was  called  to  the  presidency  of  Yale  College  in  1778  and  con- 
tinued in  that  office  until  his  death  in  1795.  Most  of  his  notes 
and  drawings  are  contained  in  a  series  of  manuscripts  which  he 
called  his  Itineraries,  now  preserved  in  the  Library  of  Yale 
University.  Many  extracts  from  these  Itineraries  have  been 
published  recently,  but  not  the  many  passages  which  contain 
his  notes  about  inscribed  rocks,  a  subject  in  which  he  was 
especially  interested. 

Dr.  Stiles's  interest  in  the  rock  was  first  aroused  by  seeing 
a  copy  of  the  Mather  Broadside  in  the  fall  of  1766.  On  May 
27,  1767,  he  learned  from  Mr.  Edward  Shove  of  Assonet  Neck 
that  the  "cyphered  Stone"  was  situated  half  a  mile  from  the 
latter's  house.  On  June  5th  he  rode  from  Taunton  to  Shove's 
house,  and  they  went  together  to  the  Writing  Rock.  *T  began 
to  take  off  some  of  the  Characters,  but  without  Chalking  first. 
Next  day  I  chalked  the  marks  and  took  them  more  distinctly. 
Spent  the  forenoon  in  Decyphering  about  Two  Thirds  the 
Inscription,  which  I  take  to  be  in  phoenician  Letters  &  3000 
years  old."  He  made  a  number  of  descriptive  notes,  mentioned 
the  previously  made  drawings  by  Mather,  Greenwood  and 
Berkeley,  and  thought  that  he  detected  marks  resembling  an 
X  and  an  R  on  one  corner  of  the  flat  "slab"  which  has  been 
spoken  of  as  lying  near  the  Writing  Rock.  On  the  upstream 
end  of  the  latter,  he  detected  some  further  faint  marks,  "said 
to  be  done  30  years  ago,  some  said  12."  He  drew  these  as 
dotted  lines,  to  indicate  their  faintness  and  uncertainty,  mak- 
ing them  look  much  like  the  letters  "I  HOWOO,"  with  three 
U-like  curves  underneath.  We  have  already  seen  that  there 
is  unquestionably  something  more  or  less  like  this  in  that  pogi- 


52  DIGHTON  ROCK 

tion,  so  very  rarely  visible  in  favorable  light  that  not  more 
than  two  or  three  subsequent  observers  have  noticed  it. 

On  the  15th  of  June  Stiles  wrote  a  letter  to  Professor  John 
Winthrop  of  Harvard,  telling  of  this  visit,  asking  for  a  copy 
of  the  Greenwood  drawing,  and  expressing  the  following  opin- 
ion :  "It  is  not  a  Vermiculation  or  Lusus  Naturae,  but  a  Work 
of  Art,  and  I  believe  of  Great  Antiquity,  perhaps  up  to  the 
Phoenician  Ages :  but  I  believe  it  never  will  be  interpreted." 
On  July  15,  1767,  he  was  again  at  Edward  Shove's.  After 
washing  and  scrubbing  the  rock,  he  attempted  to  take  some 
full-sized  impressions  of  its  figures  by  using  cartridge  paper 
pressed  upon  them.  Failing  in  this,  he  made  a  drawing  by 
copying  the  characters  as  he  had  chalked  them  on  the  rock, 
devoting  about  two  hours  to  the  task.  On  the  following  morn- 
ing, he  took  another  copy  on  a  larger  scale.  His  Diary  records 
that  he  visited  Dighton  Rock  again  many  years  later,  on  May 
16,  1783,  and  still  again  on  October  3,  1788.  On  the  latter 
occasion  he  worked  for  an  hour  and  a  quarter  on  a  new  draw- 
ing, but  became  discouraged  and  did  not  finish  it;  and  the 
fragment  cannot  now  be  discovered.  At  various  times  he  made 
drawings  also  of  other  similar  inscriptions,  in  Rhode  Island 
and  Connecticut,  to  which  we  shall  give  attention  in  later 
chapters. 

The  three  drawings  of  1767  are  reproduced  in  the  Colonial 
Society  plates,  and  one  of  them  is  shown  in  our  Figure  9.  That 
of  June  6  occupies  four  pages  of  the  Itinerary,  each  measuring 
about  6%  by  7^i  inches.  Placed  together,  therefore,  the  whole 
drawing  measures  about  7^  by  24^.  The  right  and  left 
halves  are  drawn  on  somewhat  differing  scales.  On  them 
Stiles  wrote  a  number  of  indications  of  dimensions,  and  a  few 
descriptive  remarks.  The  drawing  of  July  15  (Figure  9)  is 
also  in  the  Itinerary,  where  it  covers  two  pages,  and  therefore 
measures  about  75/^  by  12^  inches.  It  attempts  to  indicate 
the  relative  breadth  of  the  lines,  shows  the  position  of  some  of 
the  natural  cracks  in  the  rock  by  dotted  lines,  and  gives  mar- 
ginal indications  of  the  dimensions  in  feet. 

The  drawing  of  July  16,  being  made  on  a  larger  scale,  is 


RECORD  OF  PHCENICIAN  ADVENTURE        53 

not  in  the  Itinerary.  It  is  on  two  sheets  of  paper  pasted  together, 
measuring  together  12%  by  3134  inches,  the  drawing  itself 
being  about  9  by  23  inches.  On  the  back  is  a  carefully  executed 
separate  drawing  of  one  of  the  groups  of  figures,  4  by  6^ 
inches  in  size.  The  main  drawing,  like  that  of  the  day  before, 
indicates  the  breadth  of  the  lines  on  the  rock,  but  contains  no 
marks  of  dimension.  The  separate  figure,  however,  is  divided 
by  dotted  lines  into  squares  corresponding  in  numbering  to  the 
indications  of  dimensions  in  feet  as  given  on  the  drawing  of 
the  15th.  In  one  corner  of  the  face  is  written:  "Characters 
on  the  Writing  Rock,  whose  Incisions  were  obvious  &  unques- 
tionable decyphered  July  16,  1767.  Given  to  Yale  College 
Museum  /  Ezra  Stiles  /  1788;"  and  on  the  back:  "Dighton 
Writing  Rock  said  to  consist  of  Punic  or  Carthaginian  Char- 
acters." The  drawing  is  now  in  the  collection  of  the  Massa- 
chusetts Historical  Society. 

The  three  drawings  are  in  some  respects  so  unlike  as  to 
show  little  indication  of  having  been  made  by  the  same  hand. 
Other  features,  however,  especially  the  representations  of 
human  beings  and  the  triangular  figures,  which  are  presented 
in  an  essentially  like  manner  by  nearly  every  one  who  has  ever 
copied  the  inscription,  are  naturally  nearly  alike  in  these.  The 
figure  usually  drawn  as  a  quadruped  bears  no  resemblance  to  its 
usual  manner  of  depiction  on  the  first  drawing,  but  slight  re- 
semblance on  the  second,  and  is  lacking  on  the  third.  In  view 
of  later  importance  attached  to  them,  it  is  particularly  interest- 
ing to  compare  together  the  two  lines  of  characters  near  the 
centre  of  the  inscription  which  contain  some  resemblance  to 
letters  of  the  alphabet.  Besides  irregular  marks  possessing  no 
such  resemblance,  the  upper  line  includes  shapes  somewhat  like 
XXXIM  on  June  6,  XXX  only  on  July  15,  XXXIN  on  July 
16,  and  cXXXIM  in  the  drawing  on  the  back  of  the  latter. 
Calling  the  diamond-shaped  character  an  O,  and  neglecting 
irregular  curves,  the  lower  line  can  be  best  likened  to  O  .  .  OX 
on  June  6,  y7X  on  July  15,  and  OnQX  on  July  16.  As  a 
whole,  the  June  drawing  is  very  dissimilar  to  the  two  of  July; 
yet  a  distinct  individuality  of  style  is  perceptible  in  them  all. 
That  of  July  16  is  very  similar  to  the  one  of  the  day  before, 


54  DIGHTON  ROCK 

being  based  on  the  same  chalking ;  but  it  contains  fewer  figures, 
the  omissions  being  mainly,  but  not  wholly,  in  the  lower  part. 
It  appears  more  carefully  and  accurately  drawn  than  the  others, 
and  impresses  me  as  the  best  one  that  Stiles  made,  though  not 
the  most  complete. 

One  significance  of  these  drawings  is  that  they  are  the 
earliest  that  show  the  entire  sculptured  surface  of  the  rock  in 
a  serious  manner.  Danforth's  gave  less  than  half.  Mather's 
"second  line"  was  published  upside-down,  and  hence  has 
hitherto  been  valueless;  and  even  in  its  correct  position  it  is 
seen  to  be  ill-drawn  and  badly  distorted.  Greenwood's  draw- 
ing went  only  a  little  beyond  Danforth's.  These  of  1767  show, 
as  Stiles  says,  about  two-thirds  of  the  face  of  the  rock ;  but  this 
is,  nevertheless,  nearly  the  whole  surface  so  far  as  any  artificial 
characters  can  be  discovered  on  it.  No  one  has  ever  given  more 
than  these  drawings  include,  except  perhaps  for  a  few  single 
figures  that  some  have  claimed  to  discover  where  others  have 
seen  little  or  nothing. 

That  Stiles  was  not  content  with  his  drawings  and  still 
wished,  after  his  own  unsuccessful  attempt,  to  secure  a  full- 
size  direct  impression  of  the  characters  themselves,  is  shown  by 
the  fact  that,  at  his  request,  an  attempt  was  made  on  August 
15,  1767,  by  Elisha  Paddack  of  Swansea  assisted  by  John  Hud- 
son, to  "take  off  some  of  the  figures  as  big  as  the  life."  They 
mixed  ink  and  flour  into  a  paste,  filled  in  such  marks  on  the 
rock  as  they  took  to  be  artificial,  squeezed  paper  upon  it,  and 
then  pricked  off  the  resulting  "negative"  designs  onto  new 
paper.  One  small  figure  from  this  copy  is  preserved  in  Stiles's 
Itinerary,  and  another,  much  larger  but  still  very  incomplete 
and  of  no  particular  value  for  reproduction,  is  in  possession 
of  the  American  Academy  of  Arts  and  Sciences  in  Boston. 
This  impression,  as  well  as  some  of  Stiles's  drawings,  is  appar- 
ently referred  to  by  du  Simitiere  as  having  been  shown  to  him 
by  Stiles  at  Newport  in  June,  1768.  Paddack  suggested  to 
Stiles  in  a  letter  of  January  7,  1768,  that  one  of  the  figures  at 
the  extreme  right  was  meant  to  represent  the  "Phenitian  God 
Dagon  that  we  read  of  in  the  Old  Testament,"  whom  the  Rev. 


RECORD  OF  PHCENICIAN  ADVENTURE        55 

Mr.  West  had  described  to  him  as  customarily  drawn  in  the 
form  of  a  half-man  and  half-fish. 

The  next  actor  on  the  scene  was  Stephen  Sewall,  Hancock 
Professor  of  Hebrew  and  other  Oriental  Languages  at  Har- 
vard College.  He  made  a  life-size  drawing  of  the  rock  on  Sep- 
tember 13,  1768.  Very  likely  this  production  had  some  rela- 
tionship to  John  Winthrop's  failure  in  1744  to  satisfy  the 
request  of  Timothy  Hollis;  for  in  1774  Winthrop  sent  a  re- 
duced copy  of  Sewall's  drawing  to  Hollis,  with  the  remark  that 
it  was  the  "most  exact  copy"  that  was  ever  taken.  Sewall  him- 
self relates  the  circumstances  under  which  it  was  made,  and 
expresses  his  own  opinions.  He  had  as  collaborator  Thomas 
Dan  forth,  grandson  of  the  Rev.  John  Dan  forth  of  Dorchester ; 
and  they  were  assisted  by  Seth  Williams  and  David  Cobb,  and 
by  William  Baylies,  prominent  physician  and  judge  in  Digh- 
ton,  who  was  intimately  connected  with  several  later  investiga- 
tions of  the  rock.  In  a  letter  to  Court  de  Gebelin  in  1781,  a 
copy  of  which  he  wrote  also  upon  one  corner  of  his  original 
drawing,  Sewall  expresses  the  belief  that  "the  level  of  the  beach 
seems  to  have  risen  and  to  have  covered  a  considerable  part"  of 
the  inscription,  and  remarks  that  "the  greater  part  of  it  is 
effaced  to  such  a  degree  that  it  is  no  longer  possible  to  dis- 
tinguish any  characters  in  these  portions  of  it."  Of  opinions 
he  says :  "Some  imagine  it  to  be  the  work  of  Phoenicians  who 
were  driven  hither  from  Europe;  others  judge  it  to  be  rather 
hieroglyphical  than  literal,  and  that  thus  it  may  have  been  due 
to  navigators  from  China  or  Japan!"  As  for  himself,  "I 
imagine  it  to  be  the  work  of  the  Indians  of  North  America, 
done  merely  for  amusement."  Again,  in  a  letter  to  Stiles  on 
January  13,  1768,  he  says:  "I  confess  I  have  no  faith  in  the 
significancy  of  the  characters.  There  is  indeed  in  some  of  the 
figures  an  appearance  of  design.  But  the  strokes  in  general 
appear  to  be  drawn  at  random :  So  that  I  cannot  but  think  the 
whole  to  be  a  mere  hisiis  Indoriim."  We  are  still  further 
assured,  by  Kendall  on  the  authority  of  Dr.  Bentley,  that 
Sewall  saw  nothing  on  the  roolc  which  reminded  him  of  any 
ancient  alphabet. 

Sewall's  was  the  first  complete  drawing  of  the  inscription 


56  DIGHTON  ROCK 

which  was  published,  and  the  first  complete  one  made  of  the 
full  size  of  the  face  of  the  rock.  It  was  kept  for  a  long  time 
in  the  Museum  or  Mineral  Room  of  Harvard  Hall,  in  charge 
of  the  Librarian,  and  this  fact  was  probably  responsible  for  the 
origin  of  a  mistaken  report  that  there  was  a  "facsimile  cast  in 
the  Geological  collection  at  Cambridge."  Reproductions  of  it 
on  a  smaller  scale  were  published  by  Court  de  Gebelin  in  1781 
from  a  copy  sent  to  him  by  Sewall,  and  by  Lort  in  1787  from 
the  copy  sent  by  John  Winthrop  in  1774  to  Timothy  Hollis; 
and  from  these  two  sources  all  later  reproductions  have  been 
derived.^ 

In  the  spring  of  1774,  John  Winthrop  made  a  second  visit 
to  Dighton  Rock,  but  made  no  drawing.  On  the  following  14th 
of  November  he  wrote  to  Timothy  Hollis,  at  last  complying 
with  his  request  of  thirty  years  before  by  sending  him  a  copy 
of  the  Sewall  drawing,  as  we  have  seen.  The  letter  shows  that 
he  was  not  exempt  from  the  erroneous  impression  that  so  fre- 
quently occurs,  that  "the  characters  do  not  appear  so  plain  now 
as  they  did  about  thirty  years  ago."  He  seems  to  have  shared 
without  hesitation  Sewall's  opinion  that  the  lines  were  carved 
by  Indians,  but  expresses  uncertainty  as  to  whether  it  was 
designed  by  them  "as  a  memorial  of  any  remarkable  event,  or 
was  a  mere  hisiis  at  their  leisure  hours,  of  which  they  have  a 
great  number."  But  he  concludes  with  a  statement  which  we 
have  seen  cannot  be  accepted  without  fuller  investigation,  that 
"  'tis  certain  it  was  done  before  the  English  settled  in  this 
country." 

Thus  far  we  have  met  with  a  few  attempts  to  depict  the 
appearance  of  the  inscription,  differing  from  one  another  to  a 
remarkable  degree,  and  with  a  few  suggestions  as  to  what 
might  have  been  its  origin,  but  with  no  attempt  to  interpret 
it  in  detail.  Now  the  scene  changes.  Our  history  enters  upon 
an  era  of  romantic  and  uncontrolled  translations  in  which  fact 
and  fancy  meet  in  weird  partnership,  and  no  critical  attitude 
is  taken  toward  the  reliability  of  the  drawings  upon  which  the 
readings  are  based.     The  belief  that  the  rock  exhibits  only  the 

iSee  Figures  6  and  13,  and  a  still  more  accurate  version  in  the 
Colonial  Society  plates. 


RECORD  OF  PHCENICIAN  ADVENTURE        57 

commonplace  and  unreadable  products  of  rude  Indian  art  con- 
tinues to  be  held  by  cautious  thinkers;  but  all  of  those  who 
in  the  next  fifty  years  announced  a  full  solution  of  the  riddle 
held  that  they  found  in  it  proof  of  visits  to  these  shores  in  the 
distant  past  by  Phoenicians  or  other  transoceanic  peoples.  The 
first  to  give  rein  to  his  exuberant  imagination  in  this  manner 
was  Antoine  Court  de  Gebelin ;  and  his  theory  had  a  far-reach- 
ing influence  upon  subsequent  opinion  and  discussion.  Sewall's 
drawing  came  to  him  as  he  was  engaged  in  the  preparation  of 
the  eighth  volume  of  his  elaborate  treatise  on  Le  Monde 
Primitif,  and  was  enthusiastically  greeted  by  him  as  furnish- 
ing the  most  convincing  proof  of  his  belief  that  Phoenician 
navigators  had  sailed  "boldly  and  gloriously"  throughout  the 
ancient  world,  even  to  America.  He  published  the  volume  in 
1781,  and  claimed  in  it  that  the  Dighton  monument  could  not 
have  been  the  work  of  American  Indians,  and  was  certainly 
inscribed  "in  very  ancient  times  by  Phoenicians,  perhaps  even 
by  those  of  whom  Diodorus  speaks."  The  inscription  is  a 
record  of  the  fact  that  a  company  of  Carthaginian  sailors,  com- 
ing from  a  land  of  abundance  and  high  culture,  dwelt  here  for 
a  time  in  amicable  relations  with  the  ignorant  natives,  and  then, 
consulting  their  Oracle,  obtained  assurance  of  a  prosperous 
return  homeward.  In  support  of  this  reading,  Gebelin  analyzed 
the  drawing  in  detail,  discovering  a  meaning  for  almost  every 
one  of  the  figures  that  it  contains.  He  gives  a  beautiful  illus- 
tration of  the  proneness  of  an  uncritical  mind  to  mistake  its  un- 
restrained fancies  for  actual  truths.  It  is  sufficient,  however, 
to  present  his  exposition  in  a  very  much  condensed  form.  Most 
of  the  particular  figures  that  he  mentions  can  be  readily  iden- 
tified in  the  Sewall  drawing  of  Figures  6  and  13,  although 
difficulty  may  be  found  in  detecting  any  resemblance  to  what 
he  sees  in  a  few  cases,  especially  that  of  the  "horse."  "The 
monument  is  divided,"  he  says,  "into  three  unmistakable  scenes, 
one  representing  a  past,  another  a  present,  and  the  third  a  future 
event ;"  and  then  he  continues : 

First  Scene. — At  the  right  are  four  figures  which  turn  their 
backs  on  the  scene  representing  the  present.     They  clearly  relate 


58  DIGHTON  ROCK 

to  a  past  event.  Their  nature  indicates  that  those  who  engraved 
them  were  Phcenician  navigators,  either  from  Tyre  or  from  Car- 
thage. The  figure  at  the  extreme  right  is  Priapus,  god  of  fecun- 
dity, father  of  fruits.  He  cannot  be  mistaken.  He  indicates  the 
country  whence  come  these  bold  navigators, — a  country  of  pros- 
perity and  abundance.  The  next  figure  to  the  left  is  an  owl,  sym- 
bol of  Minerva,  Isis  or  Astarte,  goddess  of  wisdom  and  of  the 
arts.  It  indicates  the  superiority  in  the  arts  and  the  skill  in  navi- 
gation of  the  nation  of  these  newly  landed  sailors.  The  next 
figure,  a  little  to  the  left  and  lower  down,  is  the  head  of  a  sparrow- 
hawk,  with  a  kind  of  mantle  over  its  shoulders.  It  symbolizes  per- 
sons who  have  come  by  sea.  Among  the  Egyptians  and  Phoeni- 
cians, the  sparrow-hawk  was  an  emblem  of  the  winds,  especially 
of  the  north  wind,  which  is  necessary  in  order  to  pass  from  Europe 
to  America.  The  fourth  figure,  furthest  left  in  this  group,  is  un- 
mistakably the  little  Telesphore,  divinity  of  a  happy  outcome.  He 
is  wrapped  in  a  sleeveless  mantle,  and  covered  with  his  hood.  He 
shows  that  the  voyage  has  met  with  the  greatest  success. 

Second  Scene. — This  represents  the  present,  and  for  this  reason 
is  placed  in  the  middle  of  the  picture.  Its  essential  objects  are 
two  animals  that  face  one  another,  armed  with  banners  and 
streamers  that  float  in  the  wind.  One  represents  the  foreign 
nation,  the  other  the  American.  The  former  is  a  horse,  at  rest 
in  a  kneeling  position ;  the  other  a  beaver,  recognizable  by  its  long 
flat  tail.  Their  good  accord  proves  the  intelligence  of  the  two 
nations,  and  the  favorable  reception  given  to  the  strangers. 

The  horse,  and  particularly  the  head  of  this  proud  animal,  was 
the  symbol  of  Carthage,  as  a  maritime  city,  situated  in  a  fertile 
and  fruitful  land.  The  horse  was  also  a  symbol  of  Neptune,  of 
navigation,  and  of  ships.  This  horse  moreover  has  the  air  of  a 
sovereign,  while  the  beaver  has  almost  that  of  a  suppliant, — vivid 
picture  of  the  difference  between  the  noble  pride  of  science  and 
of  the  arts,  and  the  timid  weakness  of  ignorance. 

The  upper  part  of  this  scene  shows  a  large  space  enclosed  on 
all  sides,  with  three  re-entrant  gates  facing  north,  east  and  south. 
It  ends  toward  the  west  in  a  triangle  within  which  is  a  cross.  This 
is  evidently  a  habitation  divided  into  two  parts,  of  which  the  larger 
was  the  dwelling  of  the  natives,  the  smaller  one  that  of  the  stran- 
gers, who  placed  a  cross  therein.  It  is  known  that  the  cross  was  in 
use  in  most  remote  antiquity  among  the  Egyptians ;  and  the  Car- 
thaginians were  acquainted  with  it  also,  and  used  it  as  an  instru- 


RECORD  OF  PHCENICIAN  ADVENTURE       59 

ment  of  punishment.  To  the  left  of  this  dwelling  is  their  bark 
or  ship,  with  stern,  prow,  mast,  and  rudder.  Below  these  is  a  band 
of  alphabetical  characters,  reading  from  right  to  left.  The  first, 
resembling  A,  may  be  an  H  or  an  A;  the  next,  resembling  a  9, 
a  B  or  an  R.  The  next  following  characters  cannot  be  deciphered. 
The  band  ends  in  three  characters  which  may  be  three  T's,  or 
more  likely  three  X's,  indicating  the  number  of  the  foreigners; 
and  another,  above  them,  which  resembles  a  Phoenician  Caph. 

Third  Scene. — This  relatively  empty  scene  represents  the  soli- 
tude of  the  future.  The  largest  figure  is  a  colossal  bust,  the  Oracle 
who  has  just  been  consulted ;  the  line  above  him  is  his  veil,  which 
is  already  drawn.  The  question  put  to  him  was  concerning  the 
time  of  departure  homeward ;  and  the  answer  has  been  favorable. 
On  the  right  arm  of  the  Oracle  is  a  butterfly  (the  right-hand 
figure  within  the  bust),  symbol  of  return,  of  resurrection.  On 
the  breast  of  the  god  is  a  character  which,  if  hieroglyphical,  is 
the  trident  of  Neptune;  if  alphabetical,  is  the  Phoenician  M,  initial 
of  the  Phoenician  name  for  water,  and  thus  again  symbol  of  Nep- 
tune. To  his  right  is  a  small  statue  or  priest;  and  to  the  left  of 
the  three  X's,  a  person  advancing  hastily.  Leftward  from  the 
latter  is  the  Q  of  the  Syracusans,  Corinthians  and  Carthaginians. 
It  is  the  initial  letter  of  the  name  Carthage, — another  evidence 
that  Carthaginian  sailors,  perhaps  while  on  a  voyage  to  or  from 
England,  were  driven  by  some  northerly  tempest  to  the  shores  of 
America. 

At  the  left  extremity  of  this  scene  are  three  monograms, 
formed  of  characters  that  are  incontestably  Phoenician.  The  up- 
permost is  formed  of  the  two  letters,  Sh  and  N,  and  is  the  word 
Sh-Na,  year.  The  lower  ones  indicate  probably  the  month  and 
the  day  of  the  month.  These  letters  are  drawn  with  more  taste 
and  skill  than  the  other  figures,  which  are  very  crude.  This  is 
natural,  for  the  writer  on  the  ship  would  be  more  skilful  than  the 
painter.  Nevertheless,  the  composition  of  the  picture  is  executed 
with  much  intelligence  and  unity  of  design. 

It  seems  hardly  necessary  to  say  that  the  interest  of  Gebe- 
lin's  theory  lies  not  in  any  possibility  that  it  may  be  correct, 
but  in  its  historical  and  psychological  importance  as  an  influence 
in  shaping  opinion  and  as  a  stage  in  the  gradual  development  of 
scientifically  sound  views.  From  this  point  of  view  every  fact, 
however  trivial,  every  drawing,  however  distorted,  and  every 


60  DIGHTON  ROCK 

theory,  however  mistaken,  is  an  interesting  exhibit,  an  indis- 
pensable factor  in  the  dramatic  sequence  of  events  that  make 
up,  all  taken  together,  the  entire  absorbing  story.  It  is  worth 
while,  laying  aside  the  critical  attitude  toward  these  impossible 
visions,  to  try  to  think  ourselves  sympathetically  into  the  frame 
of  mind  and  limitations  of  knowledge  of  each  painstaking  pro- 
ducer of  a  drawing  and  each  exponent  of  a  theory,  and  thus  to 
derive  from  this  study  all  of  its  possibilities  of  instruction  and 
entertainment. 

Gebelin's  views  naturally  aroused  much  subsequent  discus- 
sion. Many,  like  President  Stiles,  accepted  them  favorably. 
Others  opposed  them.  Alexander  von  Humboldt,  for  instance, 
speaks  of  the  "enthusiasm  which  is  natural  to  him,  but  which 
is  highly  mischievous  in  discussions  of  this  kind."  Lort  re- 
marked :  "It  would  scarce  be  supposed  he  could  be  serious,  by 
anyone  that  did  not  consider  how  far  a  man  may  be  carried  by 
attachment  to  a  system.''  Vallancey  calls  Gebelin's  an  "ex- 
planation repugnant  to  all  history.  Many  letters  passed  between 
me  and  Gebelin  on  this  subject ;  at  length  he  acknowledged  his 
doubts;  in  short,  tacitly  gave  up  the  point."  This  "tacitly"  is 
misleading,  and  does  not  justify  its  conclusion.  Vallancey  had 
quite  as  indefensible  a  theory  of  his  own  to  advocate;  and  that 
he  was  naturally  a  prejudiced  and  unreliable  theorizer  we  are 
shortly  to  discover.  Sounder  criticisms  of  Gebelin,  however, 
were  fully  justified.  While  his  theory  was  still  a  serious  pos- 
sibility, the  attitude  of  critical  discussion,  advocacy  or  opposi- 
tion, was  the  only  one  possible,  instead  of  that  which  I  have 
just  been  defending  as  desirable  now.  The  question  is  no 
longer  a  genuine  issue.  Yet  it  is  interesting  to  notice,  in  finally 
taking  leave  of  Gebelin,  that  I  have  found — in  sources,  of 
course,  that  have  no  scientific  importance  whatever — two  re- 
vivals of  this  old  Phoenician  theory  as  recently  as  1890  and 
1915. 

A  complete  and  confident  translation  of  this  mysterious  in- 
scription had  at  last  been  published.  It  appealed  to  the  always 
keen  interest  of  Dr.  Stiles,  who  now  weaves  in  the  next  thread 
of  the  fabric  of  developing  opinion.  At  first,  as  a  record  in  his 
Diary  on  May  1,  1782,  shows,  he  was  inclined  to  question  its 


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RECORD  OF  PHCENICIAN  ADVENTURE        61 

validity.  But  these  doubts  seem  to  have  disappeared  shortly. 
On  May  8,  1783,  he  preached  his  so-called  Election  Sermon 
before  the  Governor  and  General  Assembly  of  Connecticut, 
and  this  was  afterwards  published  under  the  title  "The  United 
States  elevated  to  Glory  and  Honor."  It  was  only  a  year  and 
a  half  since  Cornwallis  had  surrendered  at  Yorktown,  and  peace 
had  not  yet  been  formally  ratified  with  England.  Indian  wars 
had  ceased  in  New  England ;  but  to  the  country  as  a  whole  they 
still  presented  a  serious  problem. 

The  future  destiny  of  the  United  States  was  uncertain,  but 
Stiles  saw  for  it  an  "elevation  to  glory  and  honor."  He  based 
his  certainty  of  this  fortunate  outcome  on  the  prophecy  in  the 
ninth  chapter  of  Genesis :  "God  shall  enlarge  Japhet,  and 
Canaan  shall  be  his  servant."  The  European  settlements  of 
America  were  of  the  blood  of  Japhet;  the  Indians  were 
"Canaanites  of  the  expulsion  of  Joshua,"  arrived  hither  both 
from  the  northeast  of  Asia,  and  probably  also  from  the  Medi- 
terranean. He  concludes,  therefore,  that  the  Indians  will 
eventually  be,  as  most  of  them  have  already  become,  servants 
unto  Japhet,  at  least  unto  tribute;  and  that  the  population  of 
this  land  will  become  very  great. 

In  the  course  of  this  argument  he  mentions  Dighton  Rock, 
citing  Gebelin's  opinion,  and  asserting  his  belief  that  in  re- 
mote antiquity  the  Phoenicians  charged  this  and  other  rocks 
in  Narragansett  Bay  with  Punic  inscriptions,  "remaining  to 
this  day." 

In  his  last  and  most  systematic  expression  of  opinion,  Dr. 
Stiles  still  believed  that  not  only  this  rock,  but  others  which  he 
had  observed  or  heard  about,  bore  Phoenician  or  ancient  Punic 
letters,  mixed  with  symbolic  and  ideographic  characters,  and 
were  inscribed  some  3000  years  ago.  His  "Memoir,"  in  which 
these  views  were  expounded,  was  dated  June  8,  1790,  prepared 
for  presentation  to  the  American  Academy  of  Arts  and 
Sciences,  and  was  never  published.  He  realized  that  it  was 
based  largely  on  imagination  and  conjecture,  but  hoped  that  it 
would  arouse  interest  in  such  rocks  and  investigation  of  them. 

It  was  this  sermon  by  Stiles,  together  with  Gebelin's  discus- 
sion, that  led  the  Rev.  Michael  Lort  to  search  in  1786  for 


62  DIGHTON  ROCK 

previous  references  to  the  rock.  Most  of  the  contents  of  the 
paper  that  he  read  before  the  Society  of  Antiquaries  of  Lon- 
don, and  pubHshed  in  Archaeologia  in  1787,  the  unreHable 
source  of  nearly  all  reports  as  to  the  earlier  history  of  the  case 
until  now,  have  been  presented  in  earlier  connections.  As  to 
his  own  opinions,  he  was  really  non-committal  at  this  time. 
"When  I  first  saw  it,"  he  says,  "in  M.  Gebelin's  book,  I  own  I 
could  conceive  of  it  as  nothing  more  than  the  rude  scrawls  of 
some  of  the  Indian  tribes,  commemorating  their  engagements, 
their  marches,  or  their  hunting  parties,  such  as  are  to  be  seen 
in  different  accounts  of  these  nations,"  But  he  does  not  tell 
us  whether  he  still  holds  to  this  opinion.  After  his  paper  and 
Vallancey's,  which  follows  it,  had  been  criticized  in  the  English 
Review,  however,  and  the  reviewer  had  told  the  story  of  Dean 
Berkeley's  visit  to  the  rock  and  resulting  belief  that  the  marks 
were  due  to  natural  forces  of  erosion  only,  Lort  wrote  to 
Bishop  Percy  on  April  16,  1790,  saying:  "I  have  reduced  it  to 
the  lowest  standard  of  human  art,  by  supposing  it  the  scrawl 
of  Indian  hunters ;"  but  now,  after  learning  of  Berkeley's  view, 
"I  am  very  much  disposed  to  be  of  this  [i.e.  Berkeley's]  hy- 
pothesis." 

The  next  following  paper  in  the  same  number  of  Arch- 
aeologia was  entitled :  "Observations  on  the  American  Inscrip- 
tion. By  Colonel  Charles  Vallancey,  F.A.S.  Read  Febr.  9, 
1786."  Supporting  his  views  on  the  similarity  existing  between 
Danforth's  drawing  and  an  inscription  found  on  a  rock  in 
Siberia,  described  and  figured  by  Strahlenburg,  he  concludes 
that  Dighton  Rock  was  certainly  inscribed  by  a  Scythian  people, 
originally  from  Armenia,  who  arrived  on  this  continent  from 
Siberia,  and  were  followed  and  destroyed  by  great  hordes  of 
Tartars,  whose  descendants  now  form  the  savage  Indians. 
Valiancy's  reputation  as  a  scientific  observer  was  not  a  flatter- 
ing one,  and  some  of  his  contemporaries  characterized  his 
"profound  investigations"  as  "ridiculous  and  monstrous  ab- 
surdities." 

As  usual,  no  one  was  yet  satisfied  either  that  the  truth  about 
the  inscription  had  been  found,  or  even  that  its  appearance  had 
been  correctly  presented.    Everyone  who  tries  to  make  a  free- 


RECORD  OF  PHCENICIAN  ADVENTURE       63 

hand  drawing  of  the  inscribed  rock  quickly  realizes  that,  what- 
ever his  skill,  his  copy  differs  to  some  extent  from  the  original. 
There  was  constant  dissatisfaction  with  the  copies  already 
made,  and  a  desire  to  obtain  something  more  accurate.  Before 
the  introduction  of  photography,  the  most  promising  method 
of  guaranteeing  complete  fidelity  seemed  to  be  to  cover  over  the 
artificial  characters  with  something  like  ink  or  paint,  and  then 
press  paper  firmly  against  the  rock  and  thus  take  off  the  char- 
acters in  exact  form  and  size.  Stiles  had  attempted  this  in 
July,  1767,  and  Paddack  in  the  following  month.  But  these 
copies  never  became  widely  known,  and  Stiles's  has  not  been 
preserved.  In  1788,  however,  James  Winthrop,  son  of  the 
John  Winthrop  already  mentioned  and  for  several  years 
librarian  of  Harvard  College,  made  use  of  a  similar  method, 
and  the  life-sized  impression  which  he  obtained  is  said  to  have 
been  long  preserved  in  the  Library  of  Harvard  College,  but 
seems  now  to  have  disappeared.  Fortunately,  however,  an  en- 
graving of  it,  from  a  copy  reduced  by  an  accurate  method, 
accompanied  by  a  letter  dated  November  10,  1788,  in  which 
Winthrop  described  his  method  and  observations,  was  pub- 
lished in  1804.  The  engraving  is  reproduced  in  Figure  6.  In 
his  letter,  Winthrop  relates  a  rather  absurd  tradition  to  the 
effect  that  "in  the  last  century  it  stood  as  much  as  four  rods 
from  the  river,  but  the  inhabitants  by  digging  round  it,  upon 
the  foolish  expectation  of  finding  money,  gave  a  passage  to  the 
tides."  Since  the  rock  has  always,  within  its  known  history, 
been  covered  at  high  tide,  no  amount  of  digging  around  it 
would  give  the  rising  waters  any  better  passage  than  they 
already  had.  A  thousand  years  ago,  as  our  Grassy  Island  ob- 
servations suggested,  the  rock  may  have  been  well  above  the 
highest  level  of  the  river;  but  if  so,  the  change  in  the  relations 
of  the  two  must  have  come  about  through  natural  processes, 
and  not  through  human  agency. 

The  James  Winthrop  Impression  was  made  under  circum- 
stances that  are  related  as  follows : 

*Tn  the  course  of  last  August,  upon  the  invitation  of  Judge 
Baylies,  of  Dighton,  I  went  to  view  the  rock,  and  take  a  copy 
of  it.     We  were  assisted  by  Rev.  Mr.  Samuel  West  and  Col. 


64  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Edward  Pope,  both  of  New  Bedford,  and  Rev.  Mr.  Smith,  of 
Dighton.  We  spent  one  day  in  clearing  the  face  of  the  rock, 
tracing  the  character,  and  painting  it  black.  .  .  .  The  next  day 
[August  14,  1788],  .  .  .  after  retracing  the  character  with 
paint,  ...  we  applied  the  paper  to  the  face  of  the  rock,  two 
of  us  managing  the  ends  of  the  sheet,  and  the  remainder,  with 
towels,  which  we  dipt  into  the  river,  pressing  the  paper  upon 
the  rock.  ...  As  soon  as  the  paper  was  dry  enough  to  be 
removed,  we  laid  it  upon  the  shore  and  completed  the  character 
with  ink."  Afterwards,  at  home,  he  traced  the  inscription  with 
ink  upon  the  other  side  of  the  paper.  Having  thus  obtained  a 
"positive,"  he  had  a  large  "pentagraph"  made,  which  would 
expand  thirteen  feet;  and  therewith  made  the  reduced  copy 
which  was  reproduced  in  the  engraving. 

The  fallacy  of  Winthrop's  confidence  in  the  accuracy  of  his 
method  lies  in  the  facts,  first,  that  it  does  not  insure  a  reliable 
distinction  between  natural  and  artificial  markings;  and  sec- 
ondly, that  he  and  his  party  painted  only  what  they  personally 
believed  to  be  inscription.  We  can  have  no  confidence  that 
their  selection  of  characters  as  artificial  was  any  more  to  be 
relied  on  than  that  of  any  one  else  who  attempts  to  depict  them. 
It  is,  of  course,  true  that  the  method  is  well  calculated  to  pre- 
sent the  size,  proportions,  and  relative  positions  of  the  figures 
in  an  exact  manner.  But  as  to  what  artificial  figures  are  actually 
there,  comparison  of  this  paint-and-paper  impression  with  the 
many  differing  other  original  copies  that  have  been  made,  from 
which  it  differs  vastly  more  than  they  from  one  another,  seems 
to  justify  the  conviction  that  Winthrop's  result  is  the  least 
trustworthy  of  any.  It  has  rarely  met  with  approval  by  any 
expert  judge,  and  has  often  been  justly  criticized.  Thus  Ken- 
dall says :  "Of  all  others  the  method  of  procuring  a  copy, 
described  by  Mr.  Winthrop,  is  the  one  most  infallibly  adapted 
for  producing  a  deceitful  issue.  .  .  .  No  such  expedient  can 
succeed.  The  greater  part  of  the  inscription  is  so  much  worn 
out,  that  the  forms,  of  which  it  is  composed,  are  wholly  subject 
to  the  fancy ;  and  in  several  places,  where  the  figures  are  plain, 
they  are  made  out,  rather  by  difference  of  color,  than  by  dif- 
ference of  surface.     Figures  of  the  latter  class  can  yield  no 


RECORD  OF  PHOENICIAN  ADVENTURE        65 

impression;  and  those  of  the  former  will  take  any  shape,  into 
which  the  printers'  ink  may  be  spread."  Elsewhere  he  says 
further :  "It  must  be  evident,  that  the  accuracy  of  the  impres- 
sion eminently  depended  upon  the  accuracy  with  which  the  ink 
was  applied.  Now,  the  sculptures  being  in  general  very  obscure, 
nothing  could  be  more  easy  than  to  apply  the  ink  erroneously." 

It  is  said  to  have  been  this  copy  by  James  Winthrop  that 
attracted  the  attention  of  George  Washington  in  the  autumn  of 
1789.  Dr.  John  Lathrop,  who  was  with  Washington  at  the 
time  of  the  latter's  visit  to  the  Museum  of  Harvard  College, 
told  the  latter  of  the  belief  that  there  were  Oriental  characters 
on  the  rock,  and  that  Phoenician  navigators,  "who  as  early  as 
the  days  of  Moses  are  said  to  have  extended  their  navigation 
beyond  the  Pillars  of  Hercules,"  had  made  the  inscribed  record. 
"After  I  had  given  the  above  account,"  says  Lathrop,  "the 
President  smiled,  and  said  he  believed  the  learned  Gentlemen 
whom  I  had  mentioned  were  mistaken:  and  added,  that  .  .  . 
as  he  had  so  often  examined  the  rude  way  of  writing  practised 
by  the  Indians  of  Virginia,  ...  he  had  no  doubt  the  inscrip- 
tion was  made,  long  ago,  by  some  natives  of  America." 

Several  other  well  known  persons,  among  whom  were  Dr. 
Jeremy  Belknap,  Ebenezer  Hazard,  and  John  Pintard,  paid  a 
little  attention  to  Dighton  Rock  in  their  correspondence  at  about 
this  time.  There  are  occasional  bits  of  mild  humor  in  their 
references  to  Dr.  Stiles  and  to  James  Winthrop,  a  general 
expression  of  doubt  as  to  the  possibility  of  any  translation, 
and  but  little  else  of  importance. 

In  the  year  following  James  Winthrop's  enterprise,  the 
restless  spirit  guiding  the  destinies  of  the  rock  led  to  the  pro- 
duction of  still  another  drawing  of  it,  concerning  which  the 
exact  facts  have  been  rather  difficult  to  determine.  There  are 
several  somewhat  differing  versions  of  it,  and  conflicting  state- 
ments as  to  who  was  the  person  chiefly  responsible  for  it.  It 
has  always  been  known  wrongly  as  "Dr.  Baylies  and  Mr.  Good- 
win's Copy,  1790,"  through  errors  in  both  name  and  date  that 
were  made  early  and  were  continued  in  the  name  attached  to 
its  reproduction  in  the  Antiquitates  AmericancE,  the  only  pub- 
lished and  well  known  version  of  it.    But  there  are  two  draw- 


66  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ings  which  are  clearly  variants  of  the  same,  in  the  collection 
of  the  Massachusetts  Historical  Society.  One  of  them  was 
presented  to  the  Society  by  W.  P.  Upham,  and  is  described  as 
having  been  made  in  1789  by  Rev.  Mr.  Smith  of  Dighton. 
The  other  was  "sent  to  Prest.  Stiles  by  Revd  Mr  Smith  1789." 
I  have  found  in  private  ownership  another  clearly  original  ver- 
sion, with  evidence  that  it  was  drawn  by  Joseph  Gooding  of 
Dighton.  One  of  these  versions,  that  of  the  Antiqiiitates,  is 
exhibited  in  Figure  6,  another,  the  "Smith-Stiles,"  in  Figure 
10,  and  all  four  in  the  Colonial  Society  plates.  The  originals  all 
measure  from  seven  to  twelve  inches  in  width,  and  from  nine- 
teen to  twenty-two  inches  in  length. 

There  does  not  seem  to  exist  in  print  any  authoritative 
account  of  the  authors  and  circumstances  of  this  historically 
important  representation  of  the  inscription,  all  of  whose  ver- 
sions must  necessarily  have  been  made  as  copies  of  the  same 
chalking  of  the  rock,  and  hence  on  one  occasion.  From  various 
unpublished  sources,  however,  we  discover  that  it  was  made 
shortly  before  July  25,  1789;  that  several  copies  were  drawn 
at  the  same  time  directly  from  the  rock;  that  Joseph  Gooding 
and  another  person,  probably  one  of  Dr.  Baylies's  sons,  either 
Samuel  or  William  Jr.,  were  the  actual  draughtsmen ;  that  the 
rock  had  first  been  carefully  studied  and  its  artificial  lines 
selected  and  chalked  by  the  Rev.  John  Smith  and  the  Hon. 
William  Baylies  of  Dighton,  the  Rev.  Samuel  West  of  New 
Bedford,  and  "an  engraver;"  and  that  the  Rev.  Dr.  Stiles, 
President  of  Yale  College,  not  yet  satisfied  with  the  several 
copies  he  had  made  or  of  which  he  knew,  was  responsible  for 
its  making,  having  applied  to  the  Rev.  John  Smith  to  secure  a 
new  drawing. 

Full  accounts  of  the  afifair  are  contained  in  a  letter  from 
the  Rev.  John  Smith  to  Dr.  Stiles,  preserved  among  the  Stiles 
papers  in  the  Yale  Library,  and  in  a  letter  from  Dr.  Baylies  to 
James  Winthrop,  now  among  the  manuscript  Papers  of  the 
American  Academy  of  Arts  and  Sciences.  Smith  emphasizes 
the  necessity  of  a  favorable  illumination  for  observing  the 
characters  on  the  rock,  which  are  commonly  almost  imper- 
ceptible.   Both  men  speak  of  the  great  care  that  was  exercised 


RECORD  OF  PHCENICIAN  ADVENTURE        67 

to  be  exact,  Smith  remarking  that  it  was  their  beHef  "that 
this  draft  has  never  been  equalled ;  nor  do  they  conjecture  that 
it  can  hereafter  be  much  exceeded."  Yet  they  concede  the  im- 
possibility of  attaining  complete  accuracy  and  exact  proportion 
in  any  free-hand  copy.  It  will  be  noticed  that  this  one  alone, 
of  all  drawings  early  or  late,  pictures  the  "bird."  Both  writers 
relate  that  they  were  told  by  Capt.  Walter  Haley  (or  Healy) 
of  Dighton  that  it  resembled  the  Cassowary,  one  of  which  he 
had  owned  for  several  years  in  the  East  Indies  (or  in  China). 
Dr.  Baylies  had  little  doubt  that  the  quadruped  represented  a 
Leopard.  Smith  mentions  suggestions  of  hieroglyphics,  of  a 
shield  and  helmet,  and  of  worship  in  high  places.  Such  things 
led  both  men  to  believe  that  the  engravers  of  the  rock  must 
have  come  from  Siberia,  and  have  been  perhaps  Scythians 
expressing  their  Symbolic  Worship. 

One  feature  of  the  importance  of  this  drawing  lies  in  the 
fact  that  it  was  the  one  used  by  Magnusen  as  the  basis  for  his 
translation  of  the  inscription  as  a  record  made  by  the  Norse- 
men; and  that  it  was  the  one  on  which  was  based  the  only 
detailed  reading  by  an  Indian  that  we  have.  Another  interest- 
ing thing  about  it  is  that,  whereas  earlier  drawings  had  intro- 
duced figures  like  I,  X,  M,  W,  O,  which  might  be  letters  or 
might  not,  this  one  introduces  in  addition  an  unmistakable  A 
joined  into  an  apparent  monogram  with  an  M,  and  also  an  R 
preceded  by  a  diamond  shape.  Both  of  these,  supplemented  by 
additions  of  later  artists,  were  made  of  definite  use  in  support 
of  the  Norse  theory. 


CHAPTER  V 

CONTINUED    ORIENTAL    SPECULATION 

The  fame  which  our  rock  had  attained  by  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century  is  attested  by  the  facts  that  it  was  described 
in  a  manuscript  journal  written  by  Frangois  Marquis  de  Barbe 
Marbois  between  1779  and  1784,  and  that  it  was  visited  in 
September,  1796,  by  Citizen  Pierre  Auguste  Adet,  French 
Minister  to  the  United  States.  For  knowledge  of  the  former 
incident  I  am  indebted  to  Mr.  Albert  Edgar  Lownes,  who 
generously  loaned  the  original  manuscript,  hitherto  unknown, 
apparently,  to  students  of  American  history,  Marbois  takes  a 
view  of  the  inscription  unusually  sane  for  that  period  of  highly 
imaginative  speculations.  He  describes  and  reproduces  the 
Sewall  drawing  of  1768,  which  he  saw  at  Cambridge,  and 
enumerates  the  current  "remarkable  ideas"  about  it,  concern- 
ing which  he  says  that  "nothing  hinders  you  from  devising 
twenty  other  conjectures  which  I  should  regard  as  equally  well 
founded."  For  himself,  he  prefers  to  believe  that  it  is  "a 
trophy  of  a  victory  of  some  American  nation  over  an  enemy 
tribe,  or  perhaps  the  pastime  of  some  idle  Indians,  more  ingen- 
ious and  less  lazy  than  the  rest."  Adet's  visit  occurred  during  a 
period  of  Gallophobia,  and  Dr.  Baylies  "fell  under  considerable 
odium  for  harboring  a  Frenchman." 

A  new  translator  of  a  portion  of  the  inscription  appeared 
about  1807  in  the  person  of  Samuel  Harris.  Many  previous 
fruitless  attempts  had  been  made  to  compare  the  ancient 
Oriental  alphabets  with  the  Dighton  characters,  and  to  wrest 
from  the  latter  their  hidden  meaning.  Harris  was  an  engraver 
who  possessed  an  extraordinary  acquaintance  with  languages, 
ancient  and  modern.  He  entered  Harvard  College  at  the  age 
of  twenty-five,  and  was  accidentally  drowned  while  a  student 

68 


CONTINUED  ORIENTAL  SPECULATION       69 

there.  As  an  antiquary,  his  "researches  were  almost  unbounded 
and  inconceivable."  He  never  wrote  anything  about  Dighton 
Rock  himself,  so  far  as  is  known,  but  among  his  papers  has 
been  found  a  sheet,  shown  in  Figure  11,  whose  right-hand 
column  contains  characters  that  were  copied  from  such  parts  of 
the  Winthrop  representation  as  might  be  thought  to  have  an 
alphabetical  value.  It  is  evident  that  Harris  regarded  them  as 
ancient  forms  of  Hebrew  letters,  and  arranged  them  in  alpha- 
betical order,  from  Aleph  to  Tau,  with  five  letters  omitted.  He 
found  several  groupings  of  these  letters  in  the  inscription  as 
represented  by  Winthrop  and  read  them  as  Hebrew  words.  All 
that  we  know  about  his  conclusions  is  related  by  Kendall :  "One 
of  the  figures  is  a  king ;  another,  his  throne  and  canopy ;  a  third 
a  priest ;  a  fourth  an  idol,  a  fifth  a  foreign  ambassador,  &c.  and, 
in  the  intervening  parts,  he  points  out  Hebrew  characters,  com- 
posing words,  which  words  explain  the  figures;  as  the  king — 
the  priest — the  idol."  By  aid  of  Figure  6,  No.  V,  and  a  little 
knowledge  of  Hebrew,  all  of  these  things  can  be  identified  in 
a  fairly  plausible  manner  in  the  Winthrop  drawing. 

There  is  a  return  to  conservatism  and  good  sense  in  Edward 
A.  Kendall's  dealings  with  the  rock  in  1807.  He  gave  a  num- 
ber of  successive  days  to  its  study,  and  made  an  oil-painting  of 
it  which  for  the  first  time  portrayed  the  lines  of  the  inscrip- 
tion with  the  faintness  and  uncertainty  that  belong  to  them.  He 
thus  avoided  the  otherwise  inevitable  error  of  personal  interpre- 
tation and  distortion.  The  painting  is  preserved  in  the  Pea- 
body  Museum  of  Harvard  University,  and  an  engraving  dupli- 
cating it  as  faithfully  as  possible  was  published  in  the  third 
volume  of  the  Memoirs  of  the  American  Academy  of  Arts  and 
Sciences  in  1809.  Later  representations  of  Kendall's  depiction 
are  copies  from  this  engraving,  but  make  it  too  detailed  and 
definite,  instead  of  retaining  the  characteristic  vagueness  and 
uncertainty  that  Kendall  gave  it.  Our  Figure  12  corrects  this 
fault,  being  based  upon  a  photographic  copy  of  the  original 
painting. 

With  due  allowance  for  the  limitations  of  knowledge  of 
the  time,  Kendall  was  the  most  thorough  and  reliable  observer 
who  ever  studied  the  rock.    Comparing  its  records  with  others 


70  DIGHTON  ROCK 

which  he  had  seen  of  unquestionable  Indian  origin,  at  two 
places  near  the  Connecticut  River  in  Vermont,  he  argued  that 
Dighton  Rock  also  was  carved  by  them,  probably  long  before 
the  arrival  of  Europeans.  It  is  unreadable,  "as  are  all  historical 
representations  or  sculptures  without  first  knowing  the  story 
it  is  intended  to  portray."  But  he  believed  it  to  be  a  memorial 
of  some  solemn  occasion  or  important  transaction,  either  civil, 
military,  or  religious.  The  apparently  alphabetical  characters 
near  the  middle  he  rendered  as  ORINX;  and  the  quadruped 
underneath  he  drew  with  an  insect's  wing,  and  thought  that  it 
represented  a  composite  animal,  a  creature  of  fancy.  He 
described  the  rock  at  length,  discussed  its  artistic  features  and 
the  merit  of  previous  drawings,  rightly  emphasized  the  impos- 
sibility of  securing  accurate  results  by  selective  chalking  of  the 
artificial  characters,  noticed  the  slab  nearly,  and  related  a  num- 
ber of  legends.  One  of  these  is  a  variant  of  Danforth's  story 
of  the  "wooden  house,"  now  spoken  of  as  a  "bird"  from  which 
thunder  and  lightning  issue — the  whole  story  will  be  given  in 
detail  in  a  later  connection.  Another  is  the  tradition  that  As- 
sonet  Neck  was  a  place  of  banishment,  which  we  have  already 
discussed.  Still  others  hint  at  a  ship's  anchor  nearly  eaten  away 
with  rust,  discovered  nearby  many  years  ago;  or  at  a  rotting 
ship  which  lay  there;  or  at  an  English  vessel,  one  of  the  first 
to  navigate  these  seas,  whose  crew  wintered  close  by  and  made 
the  sculptures;  or  at  still  another  English  vessel  which  was 
stranded  here,  whose  disaster  was  commemorated  on  the 
stone.  Two  theories,  moreover,  are  mentioned  which  had  not 
previously  found  their  way  into  the  literature  of  the  subject. 
The  first  is  that  concerning  pirates  and  buried  treasure,  which 
has  already  been  given  its  proper  chronological  place  in  our 
narration.  The  other  speaks  of  an  interpretation  by  some 
Mohawk  Indians — perhaps  the  four  Mohawk  chiefs  who  were 
entertained  in  Boston  in  1744 — to  whom  a  drawing  of  the  rock 
was  shown.  They  "declared  its  meaning  to  be  that  a  danger- 
ous animal,  represented  by  the  animal  on  the  rock,  had  been 
killed  at  the  place  immortalized;  that  the  human  figures  repre- 
sent the  persons  whom  the  animal  killed;  and  that  the  others 
denote  other  parts  of  the  affair."    Kendall  himself  interviewed 


< 


CONTINUED  ORIENTAL  SPECULATION        71 

Indians,  but  found  them  unable  to  offer  any  explanation,  except 
conjectures  as  to  some  particular  parts. 

Judge  John  Davis,  in  1809,  attempted  a  definite  explanation 
of  the  rock  as  an  Indian  memorial,  believing  it  to  represent  a 
hunting  scene.  The  large  triangular  figures  which  appear  on 
every  copy  of  the  inscription  resemble  the  gigantic  traps,  often 
a  mile  or  two  in  extent,  into  which  Indians  drove  deer  when 
hunting  them  on  a  large  scale.  Assonet  Neck  was  a  favorable 
place  for  such  enterprises.  Other  figures  on  the  rock,  he  con- 
jectures, may  represent  the  hunters,  the  deer,  arrow-heads,  a 
log-trap  with  noose,  a  river  with  a  weir  across  it,  and  perhaps 
the  marks  or  signatures  of  families  or  individuals. 

Alexander  van  Humboldt  mentioned  the  rock  rather  non- 
committally  in  1810,  drawing  from  it  only  the  conclusion  that 
we  have  no  certain  proof  that  the  Indians  had  knowledge  of  an 
alphabet,  and  that  the  characters  might  be  the  work  of  chance 
or  of  idle  amusement.  In  1812  (or,  possibly,  1821,  with  a 
probable  re-issue  in  1827)  a  new  and  rather  poor  drawing  was 
produced,  about  which  nothing  is  known  except  that  it  was 
lithographed  and  was  the  work  of  Job  Gardner,  a  maker  of 
globes  in  Dighton.  Figure  6  shows  it,  after  its  first  known 
reproduction  by  Professor  Rafn  in  1837.^ 

A  great  many  people  paid  their  respects  to  the  rock  within 
the  next  few  years.  It  began  to  receive  mention  in  Gazetteers 
about  1817,  as  the  chief  distinction  of  Dighton,  and  never 
satisfactorily  explained.  In  1817  or  thereabout,  Charles  Leo- 
pold Mathieu  published  in  Nancy  a  translation  of  a  Chinese 
poem,  and  included  with  it  a  disquisition  concerning  the  inhabi- 
tants of  Atlantis,  whom  he  regarded  as  the  carvers  of  Dighton 
Rock  and  the  founders  of  a  dynasty  in  China.  These  people 
carried  on  an  extensive  intercourse  with  the  four  quarters  of 
the  globe,  and  one  of  their  kings,  Indios,  had  a  son  named  In 
who  was  chief  of  an  expedition  to  America  for  the  purpose  of 

1 1  had  never  discovered  an  example  of  the  original  lithograph  until  the 
summer  of  1927.  It  is  owned  by  a  Mr.  Sylvia  of  Standish  Farms,  South 
Dartmouth,  Massachusetts,  and  has  written  on  it  the  name  "Henry  W.  Hart 
and  the  date  1821.  Rafn's  copy  is  exceedingly  faithful  to  the  original. 
Probably  it  was  a  re-issue  of  this  lithograph  which  the  Providence  Journal, 
July  15,  1827,  mentions  as  "just  published." 


72  DIGHTON  ROCK 

making  a  treaty  of  alliance  and  of  commerce  with  the  natives, 
in  the  year  of  the  world  1902  (B.C.  2102).  These  facts  are  all 
recorded  on  the  rock,  which  he  has  been  enabled  to  translate 
by  means  of  the  art  of  reading  hieroglyphics  which  he  has  dis- 
covered. He  probably  followed  Sewall's  version  as  published 
by  Gebelin.  Aside  from  the  fact  that  we  can  easily  imagine  the 
word  "In"  there,  we  are  given  no  clue  as  to  how  he  derived 
his  extraordinary  interpretation.  Another  setting  is  given  to 
the  rock  in  1818  by  William  E.  Richmond  of  Providence  who, 
in  a  long  poem  on  "Mount  Hope,"  declares  that  no  doubtful 
legend  ever  told 

The  age  or  nation  of  those  hapless  men 
By  fate  compelled  the  desert  coast  to  gain,  .  .  . 
Who  wrote  and  spoke  a  tongue  to  us  unknown 
And  left  their  story  on  the  mossy  stone. 

In  appended  notes,  he  expresses  the  belief  that  "we  are  justified 
in  the  conclusion  that  the  Writing  Rock  was  sculptured  by  in- 
habitants of  the  old  world,  in  some  period  of  antiquity  anterior 
to  the  general  use  of  letters." 

Edward  Everett  referred  to  the  rock  in  1820,  and  urged  its 
preservation.  In  1823,  Jean  Pierre  Abel  Remusat,  Secretary 
of  the  Societe  Asiatique  of  Paris,  wrote  of  the  inscription  as  a 
great  curiosity,  but  entertained  no  expectation  that  it  could  be 
deciphered.  "Those  who  have  tried  to  discover  in  such  figures 
either  Phoenician  letters  or  vestiges  of  Chinese  writing  are 
really  acquainted  with  neither.  In  my  opinion  it  is  very  doubt- 
ful if  any  letters  or  regular  symbolic  signs  occur  there."  J.  W. 
Moulton,  however,  having  personally  examined  the  rock  in 
October,  1824,  defended  the  belief  that  it  was  of  Phoenician 
origin.  "It  is  a  connected  chain  of  hieroglyphics  and  rude 
letters  of  the  ancient  alphabet,"  in  which  he  finds  several  fig- 
ured images,  and  Phoenician  letters  resembling  P,  W,  X,  7, 
9,  A,  M,  O,  a  triangle,  a  trident.  John  Finch,  in  1824,  sup- 
ported the  Scythian  view.  These  people  not  only  were  ances- 
tors of  the  Celts  of  Britain  and  Brittany,  but  also  of  the  abo- 
riginies  of  America.  Their  priests,  the  Druids,  left  monuments 
throughout  the  country  which  are  the  most  ancient  national 
memorials  that  America  can  show;  and  numerous  sculptured 


CONTINUED  ORIENTAL  SPECULATION       73 

rocks,  including  that  of  Dighton,  were  their  Stones  of  Memorial 
or  Sacrificial  Altars.  David  Baillie  Warden,  in  a  paper  on 
American  Antiquities  in  1825,  asserted  that  "it  is  difficult  to 
discover,  in  these  strange  triangular  figures,  either  human 
heads,  Phoenician  characters,  or  proofs  of  the  origin  of  the 
American  people."  F.  W.  Assail,  in  1827,  was  the  first  person 
we  know  of  who  wrote  in  German  about  the  rock.  Having 
seen  many  "Written  Rocks"  in  the  western  part  of  America, 
he  considered  them  merely  idle  scratchings  of  aboriginal  hunt- 
ers, added  to  by  white  hunters  and  perhaps  by  deliberate  trick- 
sters, and  all  faded  away  into  the  deceiving  appearance  of 
"curious  hieroglyphics." 

In  late  November  of  1829,  a  party  of  residents  of  Fall 
River  made  an  excursion  to  the  rock,  with  the  object  of  deter- 
mining the  feasibility  of  removing  it  to  their  own  city.  The 
same  year  is  memorable  as  being  the  one  in  which  a  letter  was 
received  by  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society,  written  by 
Professor  Rafn  of  Denmark  on  June  15,  1829,  asking  whether 
any  vestiges  of  the  Norse  voyages  to  America  could  be  dis- 
covered; and  this  led  to  the  birth  of  a  famous  new  theory, 
whose  development  will  be  traced  in  our  next  chapter.  In  1830, 
Francis  Baylies,  son  of  the  Dr.  Baylies  who  had  taken  part  in 
the  production  of  three  drawings,  published  his  History  of 
Plymouth  County.  He  was  among  those  who  held  that  "the 
absence  of  any  similar  monument  in  North  America,  and  the 
total  ignorance  of  the  natives  as  to  its  origin  and  design,  would 
seem  to  indicate  in  a  manner  too  clear  to  admit  of  doubt,  that 
we  must  look  elsewhere  for  its  authors."  He  did  not  definitely 
espouse  the  Phoenician  view,  but  nevertheless  admitted  the  pos- 
sibility of  its  being  true.  The  theory  found  a  new  definite 
advocate,  however,  in  1836,  when  John  Stark  stated,  probably 
through  careless  reading  of  Kendall's  traditions  about  remains 
of  old  ships,  that  brazen  vessels  have  been  found  near  Dighton 
Rock,  and  that  the  recently  discovered  Fall  River  "skeleton  in 
armor"  was  probably  that  of  one  of  the  members  of  the  crew 
of  a  Phoenician  vessel,  who  wrote  their  names  and  perhaps 
their  epitaphs  upon  the  rock. 

Two  other  well  qualified  candidates   for  membership  in 


74  DIGHTON  ROCK 

what  we  might  call  the  ever  popular  Society  for  the  Promulga- 
tion of  Extravagant  Views  about  American  Antiquities  must 
be  considered  before  this  chapter  closes.  They  are  rivals  of 
Gebelin  and  precursors  of  a  number  of  other  enthusiastic  but 
misguided  translators  of  every  mark  upon  the  rock,  as  depicted 
in  some  undependable  drawing  uncritically  accepted.  Unfor- 
tunately they  must  be  given  an  amount  of  space  which  is  not 
warranted  by  the  importance  of  their  theories,  but  which  is 
necessary  for  their  clear  exposition.  Their  tales  add  a  pictur- 
esque touch  to  the  variety  of  theory  that  serves  to  keep  this 
Dighton  narrative  alive  and  kaleidoscopic.  Their  results  they 
hang  blunderingly  in  the  Halls  of  Science  instead  of  in  the 
Galleries  of  Art.  But  if  we  correct  this  mistake  in  classifica- 
tion, which  tempts  us  to  criticize  rather  than  to  enjoy  their 
creations,  we  can  contemplate  them  with  as  unqualified  an 
admiration  as  we  accord  to  any  imaginative  work  of  fiction. 
Ira  Hill  was  a  graduate  of  the  University  of  Vermont, 
and  afterwards  a  teacher  in  Maryland.  In  1831  he  published 
a  book,  now  rare,  explaining  the  antiquities  of  America. 
Among  these,  Dighton  Rock  is  naturally  included,  and  is  used 
as  a  proof  that  the  Indians  were  descendants  of  ancient  Jews 
and  Tyrians.  He  tells  us  of  two  or  three  speculations  then  cur- 
rent that  we  have  not  met  before — that  the  hieroglyphics  on  the 
rock  are  Pelasgian,  or  Trojan,  or  Egyptian,  or  Persian.  He 
uses  Job  Gardner's  drawing,  and  by  its  aid  we  can  follow  his 
exposition,  which  is  here  given  in  a  much  abbreviated  form. 

In  the  first  book  of  Kings  it  is  related  that  the  Tyrians  were 
skilled  navigators,  with  knowledge  of  the  seas,  and  that  in  com- 
pany with  Jews  they  made  distant  voyages  in  the  service  of  king 
Solomon.  It  was  a  company  of  these  who  made  on  Dighton  Rock 
a  detailed  record  of  their  experiences.  The  characters  must  be 
read  from  right  to  left.  The  two  figures  on  the  right  are  designed 
to  represent  the  Jews  and  the  Tyrians.  The  latter  are  the  stouter, 
both  in  body  and  in  skill  in  navigation.  The  Jews  were  under  their 
leadership  or  guidance,  as  shown  by  the  marks  at  the  bottom  and 
from  the  shoulder  of  the  first  figure,  which  are  as  trails  indicating 
following  after.  The  Tyrians  were  soldiers  or  officers,  as  well  as 
mariners,  as  appears  by  the  weapon  affixed  to  the  breast  of  the 


CONTINUED  ORIENTAL  SPECULATION       75 

figure  representing  them.  That  they  were  in  the  service  or  pay 
of  the  Jews  appears  from  the  character  extending  from  the  head 
of  the  latter,  and  passing  over  the  head  of  the  former.  The  dots 
and  cross  marks  at  its  end  represent  the  time  of  service  on  which 
they  had  agreed,  "which  according  to  our  interpretation  was  twelve 
years."  The  long,  crooked  and  crossing  lines  extending  from  the 
figure  representing  the  Tyrians,  were  designed  to  show  the  long 
and  intricate  voyage  which  the  same  Tyrian  crew  had  already 
performed,  occupying  two  months  or  moons  (two  dots),  begun 
at  full  moon  (the  upper  circle),  during  the  ninth  year  of  the 
reign  of  Solomon  (the  8  followed  by  the  curved  line). 

The  second  division  shows  the  wandering  of  the  fleet  after 
the  new  voyage  began.  Its  upper  end  is  the  east  end  of  the  Medi- 
terranean. Some  of  the  party  left  the  ship  here  at  the  point  in- 
dicated by  a  short  mark.  The  two  long  descending  lines  are  the 
north  and  south  coasts  of  the  Mediterranean,  and  their  meeting 
point  below  represents  the  Straits  of  Gibraltar.  At  the  right  of 
the  upper  end  of  the  figure  is  a  much  branching  line  and  a  short 
detached  line,  and  these  represent  the  graves  or  green  fields  of 
Egypt,  the  last  land  they  beheld  in  that  part  of  the  world.  The 
curved  line  joining  them  to  the  main  figure  is  the  river  Nile.  At 
the  left  of  the  upper  end  of  the  figure  is  a  small  triangle  represent- 
ing a  battle-axe ;  and  the  detached  curve  to  the  left  of  it  is  a 
serpent  with  head  directed  toward  the  axe, — showing  that  the  crew 
met  a  hostile  nation  here.  The  two  lines  which  cross  the  Medi- 
terranean at  this  upper  end  show  that  they  crossed  the  sea  from 
north  to  south,  and  then  returned  to  the  north ;  the  meeting  point 
of  the  two  lines  representing  one  of  the  ancient  cities,  perhaps 
Carthage,  which  then  adorned  the  southern  coast.  At  the  lower 
end  of  the  figure,  outside  the  Straits  of  Gibraltar,  are  many  leaves, 
vines,  or  branches,  indicative  of  a  fertile  and  pleasant  country. 
Those  to  the  right  represent  the  coast  of  Africa,  where  they  tarried 
for  one  moon  (one  dot).  To  the  left  of  the  Straits  is  the  coast 
of  Europe,  along  which  they  sailed  for  two  moons  (two  dots). 
The  first  detached  line  here  represents  the  Canary  Isles,  which 
they  visited.  The  curved  lines  to  its  right  and  above  it  are  the 
coasts  of  Portugal,  Spain,  and  France.  The  last  detached  line 
at  the  left  is  England.  The  cross  just  above  shows  their  intention 
of  crossing  the  Atlantic  Ocean,  and  the  circle  is  a  sign  that  they 
set  forth  at  full  moon. 

The  third  division  shows  their  wanderings  on  the  ocean  in 


76  DIGHTON  ROCK 

every  direction,  without  a  compass  and  with  much  suffering  for 
five  moons  (the  five  dots  scattered  within).  At  the  extreme  left 
of  this  group  is  the  indication  of  their  discovering  land — a  branch 
erect  over  characters  which  denote  bonds  of  union  and  of  joy; 
and  they  remained  four  moons  where  they  first  landed  (four  dots 
at  the  extreme  left).  Some  of  the  characters  here  may  possibly  be 
Masonic. 

In  the  fourth  division,  the  detached  figure  to  the  right  of  the 
head  (a  branch  with  two  leaves  and  a  cross  stroke)  shows  that 
after  their  toils  and  wanderings  the  two  peoples,  Jew  and  Tyrian, 
united  into  one  nation.  The  time  is  indicated  by  the  lower  de- 
tached figure  to  the  right — an  8  with  two  marks  attached  above, 
denoting  ten,  and  two  dots  within — the  second  month  of  the  tenth 
year  of  the  reign  of  king  Solomon.  The  human  figure  is  their  king. 
On  his  breast  are  three  dots,  which  m^ay  represent  his  heart.  A 
line  representing  a  serpent  is  in  his  breast,  and  its  head  is  inclined 
to  and  near  the  heart,  which  clearly  shows  that  he  was  a  wicked 
man.  He  reigned  for  three  moons  (the  three  dots  above  his  head). 
Then,  at  the  date  indicated,  this  first  American  tyrant  was  slain 
for  his  cruelty  by  means  of  an  arrow  (shown  entering  his  head 
from  a  bow  at  the  left).  "May  the  example  of  those  who  first 
set  foot  upon  American  soil,  more  than  three  thousand  years  ago, 
be  remembered  by  every  American,  and  that  they  will  not  suffer 
a  tyrant  to  rule  over  them  even  till  three  moons  have  finished  their 
courses." 

There  remains  yet  one  more  person  whose  interpretation 
may  best  be  examined  in  this  connection.  His  exposition  ap- 
peared a  year  after  the  publication  of  the  Anfiqiiitates  Ameri- 
cancB,  with  which  event  we  propose  to  begin  the  next  chapter 
in  this  history.  But  for  many  reasons  it  seems  better  to  present 
it  in  connection  with  these  earlier  theories,  which  it  resembles 
in  principle,  than  in  its  exact  chronological  order.  We  are 
about  to  be  informed  with  elaborate  detail  that  the  ancient  stone 
was  carved  by  Egyptians,  that  its  puzzling  characters  have 
a  sacred  significance,  and  that  they  represent  the  position  of  the 
heavenly  constellations  as  calculated  for  the  time  of  the  winter 
solstice,  in  celebration  of  the  advent  of  a  New  Year.  This 
view  was  advanced  in  1838,  by  Moreau  de  Dammartin.  He 
was  apparently  ignorant  of  all  versions  of  the  inscription  except 


CONTINUED  ORIENTAL  SPECULATION       77 

Sewall's,  and  this  he  reproduced  from  Gebelin,  with  a  number- 
ing of  the  figures  designed  to  facilitate  reference  to  them,  and 
therefore  reproduced  in  Figure  13, 

Unfortunately,  on  account  of  its  minute  descriptive  details, 
it  is  impossible  to  condense  his  account  as  much  as  we  might 
wish.  The  following  is,  however,  a  condensation  and  not  a 
literal  quotation.  I  have  wished  to  give  enough  to  make  it  pos- 
sible to  follow  all  of  his  details;  but  the  reader  who  does  not 
care  to  do  this  can  gain  a  good  general  idea  by  reading  the 
introductory  paragraph  and  the  first  sentence  under  each  of 
the  six  numbered  groups. 

The  explanation  that  we  shall  give  of  this  curious  monument 
will  show  that  it  is  the  work  of  a  nation  foreign  to  America;  and 
consequently  that  this  land  was  visited  long  before  Columbus  by 
inhabitants  of  the  Old  World.  The  monument  appears  to  us  to 
be  a  fragment  of  the  oriental  celestial  sphere,  or  an  astronomical 
theme  for  a  given  moment,  i.  e.,  for  December  25*'^  at  midnight, 
epoch  of  the  winter  solstice.  We  are  persuaded  that,  even  if  we 
are  mistaken  in  some  details,  on  account  of  the  probable  imper- 
fection of  the  copy,  which  perhaps  offers  but  a  feeble  and  imper- 
fect idea  of  this  monument,  which  is  in  part  destroyed  or  effaced, 
yet  these  errors  will  in  no  way  affect  the  general  truth  of  our 
explanation.  We  divide  the  figures  of  the  inscription  into  six 
groups. 

First  Group :  The  central  and  highest  portion  of  the  monument, 
containing  the  constellations  and  parts  of  constellations  near  the 
pole  of  the  ecliptic. — The  most  remarkable  feature  of  this  group  is 
the  two  lines  crossing  at  right  angles  (1,  2,  4,  5),  whose  common 
section  forms  the  pole  of  the  ecliptic,  as  this  is  indicated  on  the 
planispheres  projected  on  the  plane  of  the  equator.  One  of  them 
(1,  2)  is  the  meridian  that  passes  from  the  beginning  of  the  tail 
of  the  Great  Bear  and  by  the  nose  of  Pegasus,  a  fact  which  led 
us  to  recognize  the  Great  Bear  in  the  seven  stars  joined  by  a 
dotted  line  (3).  The  other  line  (4,  5)  corresponds  to  the  meridian 
which  goes  from  the  Club  of  Hercules  to  Taurus.  It  passes  by 
the  head  of  the  Dragon  (6),  separating  it  from  the  body,  whereas 
the  first  separates  the  part  which  forms  a  loop  and  which  is  called 
the  second  vertebra  (7).  The  curve  (8)  near  the  head  of  the 
Dragon  is  formed  of  stars  constituting  the  left  thigh,  arm  and 


78  DIGHTON  ROCK 

side  of  Hercules.  We  have  indicated  by  dotted  lines  the  disposi- 
tion of  the  Dragon  about  the  pole.  The  straight  line  (9)  opposite 
the  curve  of  the  Dragon  appears  to  be  a  part  of  the  Milky  Way, 
in  which  is  found  Cygnus,  whose  stars  form  a  cross  (10).  Be- 
yond this  line  is  a  rude  square  (11)  which  Gebelin  took  to  be  a 
Phoenician  letter  Kaph,  and  which,  in  our  opinion,  represents  the 
Chair  of  Cassiopea,  a  constellation  which,  according  to  our  ex- 
planation of  the  origin  of  alphabets,  has  been  the  source  of  all 
the  alphabetic  and  hieroglyphic  Kaphs,  ancient  and  modern.  The 
point  outside  the  figure  appears  to  designate  the  star  of  the  back 
of  the  chair,  situated  exactly  on  the  upper  western  colure.  The 
point  or  small  circle  accompanied  by  a  short  line,  higher  up  (12) 
— ^the  line  being  on  the  projection  of  a  straight  line  leading  from 
behind  the  ship  Argo  through  the  two  superior  stars,  and  directed 
toward  the  star  near  the  equator,  called  the  thirteenth  of  the  Ship 
by  Flamsteed,  and  toward  the  Polar  Star — can  represent  nothing 
else  than  the  star  Castor,  one  of  the  Twins,  tutelary  deity  of 
mariners.  Ursa  Minor  also  is  figured  on  the  monument  near  the 
pole  star,  by  a  kind  of  Kaph  which  recalls  its  quadrilateral  por- 
tion (13).  To  the  right  of  the  Great  Bear  is  seen  a  space  enclosed 
by  three  lines  (14),  which  we  suppose  to  be  a  diagram  of  the  stars 
of  the  left  arm  of  Bootes,  including  that  of  the  shoulder.  The 
star  16  would  then  be  that  of  the  extremity  of  the  hand,  which  is 
situated  on  the  meridian  passing  through  the  eastern  node ;  17, 
the  star  of  the  head  of  Bootes ;  18,  his  staff,  whose  end  is  divided 
into  two  parts  because  of  the  stars  of  his  right  hand ;  19,  the  star 
of  his  right  shoulder  placed  upon  a  meridian.  The  line  which  joins 
this  point  to  the  other  figures  is  a  portion  of  this  meridian,  i.  e., 
the  part  between  the  star  of  the  shoulder  and  the  one  a  little  higher 
up  on  the  same  meridian  at  the  level  of  the  star  of  the  head.  The 
long  curved  line  (20)  is  a  tracing  which,  starting  from  the  star 
of  the  left  shoulder  of  Hercules  (Ingeniculus,  Kneeler),  nearest 
the  tropic  of  Cancer,  passes  through  his  neck,  then  through  his 
right  hand,  near  which  it  ceases,  interrupted  by  the  circular  group 
of  stars  of  the  head  of  the  Serpent  of  Ophiucus  (21)  ;  begins  again 
on  the  opposite  side,  goes  round  the  lower  stars  of  Corona  Borealis, 
and  rises  to  the  star  of  the  neck  of  Bootes,  passing  through  the 
upper  star  of  the  meridian  of  the  right  shoulder,  of  which  we  have 
spoken. 

We  notice  here  that  the  figure  in  the  form  of  a  cross,  outlined 
by  figures  6,  7,  8,  14,  greatly  resembles  an  ancient  monument  in 


CONTINUED  ORIENTAL  SPECULATION        79 

Sweden.  It  represents  a  serpent  doubly  folded  back  on  itself, 
at  the  centre  of  which  is  found  the  outlined  cross  of  the  American 
monument.  The  serpent,  symbol  of  the  Dragon  of  the  pole,  as 
is  proved  by  comparison  with  other  runic  funereal  monuments, 
commemorates  the  death  of  the  sun  and  the  birth  of  the  new  sun, 
and  thus  also  death  in  general,  and  the  passage  to  a  new  life. 

Second  Group :  The  lower  portion  at  the  left  of  the  monument, 
containing  the  constellations  whose  rising  on  December  25**^  an- 
nounces the  birth  of  the  new  sun :  Argo,  Virgo,  Hydra,  Bootes. 
At  midnight  of  this  date  the  sun  is  in  Capricorn,  and  at  the  lower 
meridian.  Aries  and  Pegasus  are  setting  in  the  west;  and  the 
star  Janus,  the  Genius  who  opens  the  new  year,  announces  it  by 
rising.    This  star  is  at  the  feet  of  Virgo,  of  which  it  forms  a  part. 

The  most  remarkable  figure  here  is  the  bust  of  a  woman  (22), 
representing  Virgo.  On  her  breast  is  a  sort  of  ancient  men,  or 
trident,  formed  by  the  tracing  of  the  nineteen  stars  of  fifth  and 
sixth  magnitudes  which  command  the  star  called  Vindemiatrix. 
The  figure  resembling  a  little  bird,  below  this  men,  is  likewise 
formed  by  stars  in  the  vicinity  of  Vindemiatrix.  Two  free  stars 
are  indicated  by  the  two  points  above  the  bird.  The  head  of 
Virgo  is  covered  by  a  long  curved  line  (23,  24,  25),  corresponding 
to  Hydra.  The  circles  described  by  this  curve  (24,  25)  are  the 
Cup  and  the  head  of  Hydra.  The  point  terminating  the  line  re- 
calls the  star  near  the  equator,  for  the  head  and  neck  of  Hydra, 
including  the  three  stars  separated  from  the  head  by  the  equator, 
form  the  Arabic  figure  2,  exactly  recalled  in  the  monument.  Near 
the  bust  of  the  Virgin  is  the  figure  of  the  little  Horus,  her  son. 
A  point,  recalling  probably  the  star  Janus,  which  would  be  on  the 
horizon  and  would  form  part  of  the  constellation  called  Mons 
Menalus,  would  be  indicated  by  figure  26,  formed  of  five  stars 
arranged  in  a  circle  and  with  a  tail  whose  motive  is  given  by  the 
stars  nearest  to  Janus  and  serving  to  identify  it.  Figure  27  rep- 
resents a  rude  outline  of  Bootes,  who  is  called  the  father  and 
the  foster-father  of  Horus.  At  the  top  of  the  drawing  (28)  is 
the  ship  Argo,  three  stars  of  which  are  indicated:  (1)  that  of 
the  rudder,  or  Canopus ;  (2)  that  of  the  top  of  the  mast,  Procyon, 
the  thirteenth  of  the  Ship,  touching  the  equator;  (3)  in  front 
Sirius,  similarly  represented  between  the  horns  of  the  Cow  in  a 
boat  in  the  circular  Zodiac  of  Dendera. 

Third  Group:  The  lower  centre,  containing  the  constellations 
on  the  western  horizon  at  the  birth  of  the  sun. — The  first  animal 


80  DIGHTON  ROCK 

is  Aries  (28),  characterized  in  a  very  singular  manner.  The 
little  circle  terminating  this  figure  recalls  the  double  star  of  the 
head,  which  is  on  the  meridian  separating  Aries  from  Pisces.  It  is 
certainly  a  poor  drawing,  yet  the  tail  is  a  faithful  representation 
of  the  stars  disposed  in  the  form  of  an  elongated  V.  The  second 
animal  (29)  is  Pegasus,  easily  recognizable  by  the  four  points 
alluding  to  the  stars  of  the  quadrilateral.  The  curved  line  rising 
from  its  withers  appears  to  represent  the  wings  that  are  usually 
given  to  it.  It  corresponds  also  through  its  horns  to  the  horned 
horse  of  the  Hebrews :  it  is  thus  that  they  depicted  Pegasus.  The 
lines  going  out  from  between  the  horns  are  the  continuation  of 
stars  included  in  the  river  of  Aquarius.  In  figure  30  it  will  be 
easy  to  recognize  the  foot  of  Aquarius,  separated  from  his  body 
by  a  portion  of  the  ecliptic  (31).  The  curved  figure  32  is  the 
outline  of  stars  in  the  lower  part  of  Capricorn,  separated  from 
the  head,  here  invisible,  by  a  portion  of  the  equator.  Figure  33 
is  Ephaptus ;  34,  the  Vase  of  Aquarius ;  35,  terminating  the  right 
hand  upper  part  of  the  group,  is  a  part  of  the  bow  of  Sagittarius, 
of  his  arrow,  and  of  the  meridian  which  separates  the  latter  from 
the  bow,  and  on  which  are  joined  both  the  circle  of  the  ecliptic 
and  the  tropic  of  Capricorn.  The  point  where  the  lines  cross  at 
36  being  the  western  node  of  the  sphere,  the  drawing  below  this 
can  be  nothing  else  than  a  crudely  represented  part  of  the  Whale. 
Figure  37,  detached  from  all  the  others,  recalls  the  Fishes  and 
the  bands  that  bind  them  together. 

Fourth  Group:  The  three  figures  at  the  right  lower  end,  not 
included  among  the  constellations,  but  forming  the  three  personi- 
fied decans  of  the  sign  of  Capricornus. — This  part  of  the  picture 
is  of  the  greatest  interest,  supporting  the  above  explanations,  and 
serving  to  enlighten  us  as  to  the  origin  of  the  constellations,  the 
first  elements  of  astronomy,  the  personification  of  the  spirits  placed 
in  the  celestial  sphere,  the  causes  of  their  various  attributes,  and 
the  numberless  traditions  to  which  they  have  given  rise. 

The  first  figure  highest  up  (38)  is  very  significant.  It  is  the 
god  Priapus,  the  Faun,  the  great  Pan,  etc.,  and,  above  all,  Orion. 
It  is  the  latter,  because  this  constellation  is  represented  in  the 
Egyptian  Zodiac  of  Kircher  by  a  satyr  or  faun  with  goat's  feet, 
with  a  shepherd's  crook,  and  with  a  syrinx  or  flute  of  four  tubes, 
represented  with  seven  on  certain  monuments.  If  one  draws  lines 
joining  together  properly  the  stars  of  this  constellation,  including 
also  the  stars  of  the  Hare,  the  result  will  be  a  figure  exactly  like 


CONTINUED  ORIENTAL  SPECULATION        81 

that  of  the  American  monument.  Behind  the  lower  part  of  Orion 
there  are  eleven  stars,  which,  joined  two  and  two  by  perpendicular 
lines  nearly  parallel,  form  the  flute  of  Pan,  or  the  four-tubed 
syrinx,  ending  at  the  tail  of  the  Hare.  If  now  one  joins  by 
similar  lines  the  stars  of  the  body  of  the  Hare  one  will  obtain  an 
instrument  with  seven  tubes  almost  as  regular  as  the  first.  Orion 
was  represented  in  this  decan,  the  third  of  the  month  of  December, 
because  the  rising  of  his  belt  announces  the  beginning  of  the  year. 

The  second  decan  (39)  presents  a  diagram  of  the  stars  of  the 
constellation  Antinous,  emblem  of  the  new  sun  which  he  precedes 
in  rising  in  the  morning.  The  eagle  placed  above  Antinous  seems 
to  bear  him  in  its  claws.  Here  it  is  the  Dolphin,  which  is  found 
indicated  above  the  head  of  Antinous,  as  can  be  recognized  by  the 
disposition  of  its  principal  stars  in  the  form  of  the  letter  N.  The 
two  characters  joined  to  the  head  of  this  decan  by  a  horizontal 
Hne  (40)  should  be  considered  as  designating  the  attributes  of  the 
personage.  We  see  in  them  a  type  of  Bootes  reversed,  and  of 
the  head  of  the  serpent  of  Ophiucus  (21)  ;  but  here  this  type  is 
considered  as  the  symbol  of  writing,  and  pronounced  em  chai  by 
the  Egyptians.  The  little  mark  detached  from  one  of  these  figures 
is  the  expression  of  a  little  group  of  stars  situated  in  the  Tropic 
of  Cancer  between  Corona  Borealis  and  the  head  of  the  serpent 
of  Ophiucus,  and  related  in  direction  to  two  stars  of  the  right  leg 
of  Bootes.  It  served  as  type  for  the  sacred  nail  of  the  Romans, 
which  they  attached  each  year  to  the  walls  of  the  temple  of  Min- 
erva; and  may  be  compared  to  the  keys  of  Janus  and  of  Cybele, 
indicating  the  opening  of  a  new  era. 

The  last  two  figures  (41,  42)  grouped  together  as  emblems 
of  the  first  decan  of  December  are  the  tracings  of  the  stars  of 
Canis  Major  and  of  Canis  Minor.  These  two  dogs  were  called 
the  Barkers  or  Warners.  They  owe  their  use  in  this  decan  to 
their  position  opposite  that  of  Capricorn ;  for  their  passage  across 
the  upper  meridian  indicates  that  of  Capricorn  and  the  sun  across 
the  lower  meridian.  These  types,  so  original  in  form,  appear  at 
first  sight  to  have  little  correspondence  with  the  celestial  Dogs. 
However,  if  we  put  on  paper  in  their  respective  places  the  stars 
of  Canis  Major,  except  those  beyond  the  meridian  passing  through 
the  head  of  Procyon,  whose  stars  should  occupy  this  place ;  add 
to  them  the  three  lower  stars  of  the  fore  feet  of  the  Unicorn,  the 
star  of  the  head  of  the  Dove  and  those  of  the  Olive  Branch  that 
it  holds  in  its  beak,  and  then  the  four  stars  of  Argo  nearest  the 


82  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Olive  Branch;  and  then  join  them  together  properly,  we  will  ob- 
tain a  figure  exactly  like  figure  41,  without  leaving  any  star  un- 
used. It  will  be  the  same  with  the  stars  of  Procyon  or  of  Canis 
Minor,  to  which  should  be  joined  the  six  stars  of  the  breast  of  the 
Unicorn,  and  the  two  small  stars  above  the  head  of  the  Little  Dog. 
The  star  at  the  extreme  right  in  this  figure  is  the  thirteenth  of  the 
Ship.  The  summit  of  the  lower  triangle  recalls  the  stars  along- 
side the  equator,  and  the  prolongation  of  its  hypothenuse  serves 
to  discover  a  small  star  in  front  of  the  fore  feet  of  Sirius  and 
placed  exactly  on  the  first  meridian,  as  is  also  the  star  of  the  eye 
of  Columba  in  the  picture  of  Canis  Major. 

Fifth  Group:  The  hieroglyphic  zone  (43)  in  the  centre  of  the 
monument,  representing  the  Egyptian  formula  EM-CHAI-EN- 
NE-NOUTE,  which  may  be  rendered :  Here  are  the  portraits  of 
the  gods,  the  divine  (sacred,  celestial)  writings. — All  of  the  letters 
of  the  alphabet  were  derived  from  the  constellations,  and  the  ones 
that  are  here  used  owe  their  forms  and  significations  to  this  source. 

Sixth  Group :  The  left  end,  containing  three  monograms  which 
appear  to  indicate  a  date. — Figure  44  is  the  hieratic-hieroglyphic 
group  rompe,  the  year ;  45  is  the  number  mcnt,  ten ;  46  is  son,  day 
of  the  month ;  and  47  indicates  the  number  of  the  month — possibly 
the  fourth,  whose  thirtieth  day  corresponds  to  the  solstice. 

Dammartin's  theory  has  much  novelty  and  charm  as  an 
addition  to  our  collection.  But  the  secret  of  such  success  as 
he  actually  attains  is  evidently  due  to  the  fact  that  any  desired 
figure  can  be  imagined  into  any  constellation,  especially  if  in 
difficult  cases  neighboring  stars  are  brought  in  to  make  the  task 
easier;  and  that  symbolism  is  so  elastic  as  to  make  it  possible 
to  assign  almost  any  meaning  to  any  figure.  If,  with  the  aid 
of  some  star-atlas  of  about  his  time,  such  as  an  old  edition  of 
Flamsteed,  we  follow  his  exposition  with  a  sympathetic  and  not 
a  critical  attitude,  we  can  verify  without  great  distortion  nearly 
every  identity  claimed  by  Dammartin,  if  each  figure,  or  in  many 
cases  each  small  part  of  a  figure,  is  taken  independently  with- 
out regard  to  its  relation  to  the  rest.  But  his  account  must  be 
taken  piecemeal  to  give  it  any  plausibility,  and  we  must  be  pre- 
pared to  accept  any  change  in  the  relative  directions  and 
distances  of  stars  in  order  to  force  them  into  position  in  our 
figures,  to  draw  numerous  imaginary  lines  marked  by  no  real 


CONTINUED  ORIENTAL  SPECULATION        83 

stars,  to  disregard  the  relative  positions  of  constellations.  Even 
then,  after  so  elaborate  a  process,  we  ought  to  get  out  of  it 
something  more  significant  than  a  picture  of  the  heavens  and 
a  commemoration  of  the  advent  of  a  new  year.  In  my  own 
"Middle  Period  of  Dighton  Rock  History,"  I  attempted  to 
show  that,  using  Dammartin's  method,  a  much  more  attrac- 
tive and  meaningful  theory — though,  like  his,  a  purely  imagi- 
native one — could  be  devised  along  similar  lines,  and  made  to 
fit  the  Sewall  drawing  and  the  constellations  fully  as  well  as 
his. 

Gebelin,  Harris,  Mathieu,  Hill,  Dammartin,  and  numerous 
later  devisers  of  detailed  interpretations  of  this  inscription, 
were  of  the  type  in  whom  the  possession  of  a  theory,  the 
imagining  of  the  presence  of  a  particular  figure,  creates  a  blind- 
ness to  all  other  possibilities.  Such  people  see  pictures  in 
jumbles  of  lines,  and  instead  of  then  proceeding  to  dismiss 
these  and  see  others  in  their  place,  as  they  easily  might,  the  very 
formulation  of  the  first,  whether  purely  fortuitous  or  suggested 
by  a  theory  that  appeals  to  them,  at  once  inhibits  the  alterna- 
tives from  arising.  So  they  develop  a  more  or  less  consistent 
story,  and  are  convinced  that  it  alone  is  the  story  that  the  maker 
of  the  lines  intended  to  relate.  Gebelin  saw  a  Priapus,  a  horse, 
a  habitation,  a  Phoenician  letter;  it  followed  that  the  figures 
were  designed  by  their  authors  to  be  just  these  and  nothing 
else.  He  believed  in  the  far-extended  voyages  of  the  Phoeni- 
cians ;  and  to  him  it  followed  that  they  unquestionably  landed  at 
Dighton  Rock  and  made  its  carvings.  Though  put  forward  as 
a  serious  scientific  discovery,  such  an  interpretation  contributes 
nothing  to  genuine  scientific  understanding  of  the  subject  it 
pretends  to  elucidate.  Yet  it  is  in  itself  of  interest  and  value  as 
a  psychological  fact,  an  example  of  a  fitting  stage  in  the  unfold- 
ing drama  of  opinion,  an  imperfect  early  step  essential  to  the 
coming  of  better  things ;  and  it  is  often  also  a  picturesque  fancy 
and  thus  a  work  of  art,  and  so  entitled  to  sympathetic  apprecia- 
tion. It  is  thus  that  our  Dighton  Rock  attains  so  deeply  rooted 
and  widely  varied  interest.  It  invites  our  attention  now  as  a 
subject  of  archaeological  investigation,  again  through  its  his- 


84  DIGHTON  ROCK 

torical  development,  then  as  an  object  lesson  in  psychology,  and 
frequently  as  demanding,  not  scientific  seriousness  and  criti- 
cism, but  aesthetic  enjoyment. 

There  has  been  such  a  confusion  of  views  thus  far  that  it 
is  worth  while  to  review  briefly  the  theories  as  to  how  the 
inscription  originated.  That  it  was  unreadable,  however 
originating,  was  claimed  by  Mather,  Stiles,  Hazard,  Kendall, 
Moulton,  Remusat,  Warden.  That  the  whole  thing  consisted 
of  accidental  marks  due  to  natural  operations  was  held  by  some 
before  Greenwood,  was  suggested  to  Berkeley,  and  was  urged 
by  Douglass  and  accepted  as  Lort's  final  opinion.  Many  be- 
lieved that  the  Indians  were  descendants  of  the  Lost  Tribes  of 
Israel,  and  some  who  thought  that  Hebrew  words  or  Phoenician 
letters  could  be  deciphered  on  the  rock  may  have  believed  that 
they  were  carved  by  Indians  who  still  retained  memories  of 
their  ancient  language  and  letters.  A  Tartar  origin  was 
assigned  to  the  Indians  by  Smibert,  Stiles,  T.  M.  Harris  and 
others ;  and  that  they  were  preceded  by  a  Scythian  race  which 
migrated  from  Armenia  through  Siberia  and  eventually  made 
these  marks  was  advocated  by  Valiancy,  suggested  as  plausible 
by  John  Smith  and  Dr.  Baylies,  and  further  elaborated  by  John 
Finch.  Apart  from  views  as  to  their  origin,  the  Indians  were 
held  responsible  probably  by  Dan  forth,  by  Cotton  Mather  at 
first.  Professor  Sewall,  Lort  at  first,  John  Winthrop,  George 
Washington,  the  Mohawk  Chiefs,  Kendall,  John  Davis,  prob- 
ably von  Humboldt,  and  Assail,  the  latter  believing  that  scrib- 
blings  by  white  men  were  present  also.  Several  motives  were 
assigned  to  the  Indians  for  the  sculptures — though  not  every- 
one who  mentions  them  himself  accepts  the  theory:  that  they 
did  it  in  idle  sport  (Greenwood,  Sewall,  John  Winthrop,  Mar- 
bois,  von  Humboldt,  Assail)  ;  in  sharpening  arrows  (Green- 
wood, du  Simitiere)  ;  as  a  memorial  of  some  solemn  occasion 
(Greenwood,  Kendall)  ;  as  a  record  of  hunting  (Abiel  Holmes, 
John  Davis),  or  of  battle  CJohn  Winthrop,  Holmes)  ;  in  part 
as  a  record  of  names  or  signatures  (Davis).  Definite  denials 
of  the  possibility  that  the  Indians  could  have  done  it  were  based 
by  Greenwood,  Gebelin  and  Moulton  on  the  arguments:  that 
they  were  too  lazy;  that  they  left  no  other  similar  monuments; 


CONTINUED  ORIENTAL  SPECULATION       85 

that  they  possessed  no  adequate  tools ;  that  it  was  beyond  their 
skill;  that  they  had  no  knowledge  of  its  existence  or  nature; 
that  it  depicts  objects  unknown  or  unfamiliar  to  them.  A  fairly 
definite  Indian  reading  of  it  as  a  record  of  combat  with  a  dan- 
gerous beast  was  given  by  Mohawk  chiefs,  according  to  Ken- 
dall; but  other  Indians  consulted  by  the  latter  were  unable  to 
interpret  it. 

There  are  vague  allusions  to  Chinese  or  Japanese  as  pos- 
sible authors  (Professor  Sewall  and  others),  or  to  Trojans 
and  Persians  (Hill),  and  to  Prince  Madoc  (Stiles,  Kendall). 
A  Prince  of  Atlantis  is  advocated  by  Mathieu,  and  some  very 
ancient  but  indefinite  European  adventurers  by  Richmond.  But 
the  theories  which  most  strongly  characterize  this  period  in  the 
development  of  opinion  were  those  attributing  the  inscription  to 
some  Oriental  people.  This  view  was  held  by  Greenwood  with- 
out specification  as  to  who  they  were ;  and  by  Stiles,  Paddack, 
Moulton,  Francis  Baylies,  Stark,  with  a  belief  that  they  were 
Phoenicians,  but  without  further  elaboration.  Hebrews  were 
probably  in  the  mind  of  Samuel  Harris.  Egyptians  were  the 
choice  of  Dammartin,  Carthaginians  that  of  Gebelin,  and  a 
mixture  of  Tyrians  and  Jews  that  of  Hill.  On  the  other  hand, 
as  Kendall  informs  us,  there  were  those  who  regarded  the 
carvings  as  the  work  of  commonplace  and  relatively  modern 
white  men,  either  early  explorers  or  pirates.  Finally,  there  are 
signs  of  the  coming  of  the  celebrated  theory  that  was  to  appear 
next  in  order,  namely,  that  Thorfinn  the  Norseman  made  the 
record  in  the  year  1008. 

Besides  these  theories,  a  number  of  drawings  had  been 
made  by  this  time;  a  few  traditions  of  value  had  been  related 
by  Danforth  and  by  Kendall;  and  the  better  preservation  of 
the  rock  had  been  urged  by  Edward  Everett  and  by  Moulton, 
and  been  considered  without  result  by  some  men  from  Fall 
River.  This  abundant  activity  of  speculation,  controversy, 
and  depiction  we  shall  find  continuing  with  even  greater  vigor 
in  the  next  hundred  years ;  and  even  the  Oriental  and  similar 
theories  will  be  found  to  possess  a  vitality  which  leads  to  their 
recurrence  from  time  to  time  in  the  midst  of  their  more  ably 
defended  rivals. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE    NORSE    MYTH 

The  Norse  controversy  that  once  raged  fiercely  about  Digh- 
ton  Rock  can  now  be  regarded  as  a  closed  chapter.  Probably 
no  one  doubts  any  longer  that  the  Northmen  actually  did  dis- 
cover some  portion  of  the  American  continent  nearly  a  thou- 
sand years  ago.  How  far  south  they  penetrated  is  still  a 
matter  of  uncertainty  and  differing  opinions,  and  with  that 
question  we  shall  have  nothing  to  do  except  in  so  far  as  it  is 
involved  in  the  history  of  our  rock.  Everyone  whose  opinion 
has  any  weight  agrees  today  that  these  hardy  rovers  left  behind 
them  no  relics  that  have  endured  and  that  the  Dighton  Rock, 
the  skeleton  with  brass  armor  found  near  Fall  River,  and  the 
old  Stone  Tower  in  Newport,  had  no  connection  with  them. 
Yet  these  were  all,  for  a  long  succession  of  years,  ardently 
supported  as  evidence  of  Norse  visits  to  Narragansett  Bay,  by 
nearly  one-half  of  the  writers  who  discussed  the  subject. 

In  view  of  the  deductions  which  were  drawn  from  it,  apart 
from  all  question  as  to  its  reliability,  no  more  important  repro- 
duction of  the  lines  on  Dighton  Rock  has  ever  been  made  than 
that  known  as  the  "Rhode  Island  Historical  Society's  Draw- 
ing." At  the  same  time  none  has  been  subject  to  more  of  mis- 
understanding and  misrepresentation.  One  current  error  of 
importance  concerning  it,  originating  in  a  misstatement  by 
Rafn,  is  that  it  was  made  in  the  year  1830;  and  a  second,  that 
the  drawing  which  has  been  frequently  published  under  that 
name  correctly  represents  what  the  Society's  committee  saw 
and  drew.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  drawing  was  not  in  exist- 
ence until  four  years  later  than  the  date  always  assigned  to 
it;  and,  moreover,  the  genuine  unaltered  drawing  had  never 
been  reproduced  before  this  present  study  was  undertaken. 

The  circumstances  that  led  to  the  production  of  this  and  a 

86 


THE  NORSE  MYTH  87 

companion  drawing  are  discoverable  mainly  from  the  manu- 
script records  of  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society.  The 
fact  that  Charles  Christian  Rafn  of  Denmark  was  undertaking 
an  ambitious  reproduction  and  translation  of  all  the  Icelandic 
manuscripts  that  bear  upon  the  Norse  discovery  of  America, 
and  wished  to  learn  whether  any  remains  of  the  Norsemen 
were  discoverable  anywhere  on  the  American  coast,  was  re- 
sponsible for  the  new  attempt  to  depict  the  characters  on  the 
rock.  In  pursuance  of  this  purpose,  Rafn  addressed  a  letter 
on  June  15,  1829,  to  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society,  ask- 
ing for  the  desired  information.  On  December  19,  1829,  the 
letter  was  read  to  the  trustees  of  the  society,  and  they  appointed 
a  committee  to  answer  it.  These  men  employed  Dr.  Thomas 
H.  Webb,  secretary  of  the  society,  to  "draw  up  a  memoir  of 
the  Writing  Rocks  in  this  vicinity,  with  a  view  to  transmit  the 
same  or  some  parts  of  it  to  Chevalier  Rafn."  In  February  the 
committee  visited  Dighton  Rock,  but  made  no  drawing  of  it. 
However,  other  drawings  were  assembled  at  about  this  time 
and  shortly  forwarded  to  Rafn;  and  it  is  this  fact,  doubtless, 
that  led  to  the  later  error,  originating  in  a  confusion  of  dates 
due  to  Rafn  himself,  of  attributing  the  Rhode  Island  His- 
torical Society's  drawings  to  the  year  1830.  With  them  was 
sent  a  letter,  dated  September  22,  1830,  calling  attention  to 
Dighton  Rock,  and  remarking  that  "no  one  who  examines 
attentively  the  workmanship  will  believe  it  to  have  been  done  by 
the  Indians." 

The  Society  received  acknowledgment  of  this  letter  in  Sep- 
tember, 1833;  and  again,  on  May  23,  1834,  Rafn  sent  a  long 
list  of  new  questions  and  stated  his  confidence  that  he  should 
probably  succeed  in  deciphering  the  Dighton  inscription.  This 
started  a  fresh  activity  on  the  part  of  the  Society.  The  matter 
was  referred  on  August  15  to  a  committee  consisting  of  Dr. 
Thomas  H.  Webb,  John  R.  Bartlett,  and  Albert  G.  Greene. 
Soon  afterwards  they  went  to  Dighton  to  make  preparatory 
arrangements ;  again  went  there,  probably  on  or  about  Septem- 
ber 4,  when  they  made  what  have  become  known  as  the  Rhode 
Island  Historical  Society's  Drawing  of  the  Inscription,  and 
the  same  Society's,  or  John  R.  Bartlett's,  View  or  Representa- 


88  DIGHTON  ROCK 

tion  of  the  Rock  in  its  surroundings.  They  went  finally  for  a 
third  time  on  December  1 1  to  revise  and  perfect  the  Drawing. 
Meanwhile  they  prepared  four  separate  letters  describing  their 
activities  and  replying  to  Rafn's  questions,  assembled  a  number 
of  useful  documents,  and  forwarded  the  whole  early  in  Feb- 
ruary of  1835. 

During  the  summer  of  1835  the  committee  continued  its 
activities,  searching  out  and  preparing  drawings  of  other 
inscribed  rocks  about  Narragansett  Bay,  and  answering  fur- 
ther questions  raised  by  Rafn.  The  facts  of  interest  concern- 
ing these  additional  rocks  will  be  examined  in  later  chapters. 
No  further  contributions  on  the  subject  were  sent  by  the 
Rhode  Island  society  to  Denmark,  but  the  society's  records  give 
evidence  of  a  continued  correspondence  with  Rafn  and  an 
active  interest  in  these  matters  for  at  least  the  next  half-dozen 
years.  In  1836  there  is  recorded  a  long  report  on  the  general 
subject  of  Inscription  Rocks,  emphasizing  their  importance  and 
urging  further  efforts  toward  their  discovery,  study  and  preser- 
vation. In  1838  the  society  seriously  considered  the  possibility 
of  purchasing  Dighton  Rock,  but  took  no  effective  action  to 
that  end. 

Great  care  was  exercised  by  the  committee  in  making  its 
drawings  of  1834.  The  rock  was  cleaned,  and  then,  as  Bart- 
lett  described  the  process  later,  "Dr.  Webb  and  Judge  Greene 
traced  with  chalk  every  indentation  or  line  that  could  be  made 
out,  while  I,  standing  further  off,  made  a  drawing  of  them.  As 
I  progressed  with  my  drawing,  my  companions  compared  every 
line  with  the  corresponding  one  on  the  rock,  to  make  sure  that 
every  figure  was  correctly  copied,  and  nothing  omitted."  Dr. 
Webb,  also,  testified  to  their  care  to  secure  absolute  accuracy. 
"We  have  copied,  with  continuous  lines,  all  that  is  still  to  be 
clearly  ascertained ;  by  broken  or  interrupted  lines,  certain  por- 
tions which  we  feel  considerably  confident  about,  although  the 
unaided  eye  would  not  have  enabled  us  to  copy  them ;  but  there 
is  much,  very  much,  that  is  beyond  our  power  to  delineate  with 
the  least  degree  of  accuracy;  all  such  we  have,  of  course,  left 
unrepresented.  What  is  figured  was  carefully  examined  by 
four  individuals,  each  inspecting  for  himself,  and  subsequently 


THE  NORSE  MYTH  89 

conferring  with  the  others;  and  nothing  was  copied  unless  all 
agreed  in  relation  to  it."  As  a  result,  the  committee  reported 
to  the  society  that  "this  Drawing  is  confidently  offered  as  a 
true  delineation  of  what  is  now  to  be  seen  on  the  rock,  altho' 
it  will  be  found  to  differ  much  from  every  other  copy  that  has 
come  under  our  observation."  The  trouble  with  such  con- 
fidence is  that  it  was  quite  as  strongly  felt  and  quite  as  fully 
justified  in  the  case  of  nearly  every  other  drawing  or  photo- 
graph ever  taken;  and  these  disagree  with  one  another.  The 
only  hope  of  discovering  what  was  written  in  the  obscure  and 
disputed  portions  of  the  inscription  is  to  give  months  of  study, 
not  only  to  the  rock,  but  also  to  the  most  perfect  possible  photo- 
graph of  it ;  and  even  then,  much  must  remain  unsolved.  De- 
ductions founded  upon  any  drawing  or  any  number  of  drawings 
and  photographs  from  chalkings  must  necessarily  be  erroneous. 
But  this  is  an  anticipation  of  conclusions  to  be  elaborated  later, 
and  is  introduced  here  only  to  assist  in  a  sound  judgment  of  the 
theories  that  are  to  be  discussed  meanwhile. 

The  original  drawings  that  were  sent  to  Rafn  are  preserved 
in  the  Royal  Library  at  Copenhagen,  and  photographic  copies 
of  them  have  been  secured.  Rafn  was  not  content  merely  with 
accurately  reproducing  them  as  they  were  sent  to  him.  Con- 
sequently, in  my  Colonial  Society  papers  I  exhibited  his  repro- 
ductions side  by  side  with  their  originals  in  Plates  XXXHI 
and  XXXIV.  All  of  the  important  features  of  difference  be- 
tween the  original  and  the  Rafn  version  can  be  discovered,  how- 
ever, by  comparing  the  usual  reproduction  of  the  Drawing  as 
given  in  Figure  6,  copied  from  Rafn,  with  the  original  as 
accurately  rendered  in  Figure  14.  In  the  View,  Rafn  has 
greatly  embellished  the  landscape,  and  introduced  a  great  deal 
more  of  detail  in  the  inscription.  The  added  details  have  clearly 
been  transferred  from  the  other  Drawing.  The  reproduction 
of  the  Drawing  is  very  faithful  to  the  original  with  the  minor 
exception  that  the  outline  of  the  rock  has  been  copied  from  the 
View  instead  of  from  the  original  drawing,  and  with  the  fur- 
ther exceedingly  important  exception  that  in  certain  parts  of  the 
inscription  Rafn  added  a  number  of  conjectural  lines  of  the 
most  essential  importance  for  the  interpretation  of  the  inscrip- 


90  DIGHTON  ROCK 

tion  that  he  advocated.  These  inserted  lines  are  all,  with  one 
exception,  in  the  central  portion  of  the  inscription,  and  are  as 
follows :  the  entire  character,  resembling  a  Greek  Gamma,  that 
precedes  the  three  X's ;  the  very  short  lower  portion  of  the  right- 
hand  line  of  the  character  M  in  the  same  line ;  in  the  line  below, 
following  the  diamond  shape,  the  lower  half  of  the  upright 
line  of  the  R,  all  of  the  F  except  the  upper  half  of  its  upright 
line,  the  entire  I,  the  first  upright  of  the  misshapen  N,  and  the 
two  horizontal  lines  of  the  X ;  and  finally,  at  the  extreme  left 
of  the  drawing,  all  of  the  P-like  character  except  its  dotted  out- 
lines, which  by  themselves  alone  do  not  resemble  a  P.  Rafn 
believed  that  he  was  justified  in  supplying  these  conjectural 
restorations,  through  a  comparison  of  the  Rhode  Island  His- 
torical Society's  drawing  with  earlier  ones,  especially  those  of 
Kendall  and  of  Baylies.  In  fact,  all  of  his  inserted  lines  are 
present  in  one  or  more  of  the  earlier  drawings,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  those  of  the  F.  Here,  where  both  of  the  Rhode  Island 
drawings  have  allowed  him  sufficient  space  to  insert  the  two 
characters,  FI,  one  or  the  other  of  them  must  be  taken  as  an 
absolutely  unsupported  conjecture  on  his  part.  By  means  of 
these  amendments  to  the  drawing,  Rafn  believed  that  he  could 
read  the  following  numerals  and  words  as  part  of  the  inscrip- 
tion: CXXXI,  NAM,  THORFINS.  For  his  purpose,  the 
Gamma  was  interpreted  as  a  C;  the  M  as  a  monogrammatic 
writing  of  NAM;  and  the  P,  either  the  one  alluded  to  above 
or  an  assumed  one  immediately  before  the  O,  as  the  Icelandic 
p,  equivalent  of  TH. 

On  the  drawing  as  he  presented  it,  Rafn  attempted  to  dis- 
tinguish his  own  additions  by  drawing  them  with  shaded  lines. 
Unfortunately,  the  shadings  are  not  very  distinct,  and  are 
easily  overlooked.  Of  the  fifteen  later  reproductions  of  this 
drawing  known  to  me,  six  present  it  without  any  shading  or 
other  marks  of  distinction  whatever,  and  few  of  the  others 
copy  the  shaded  portions  in  exactly  the  same  positions  as  on  the 
original.  Moreover,  although  it  may  be  inferred  from  his  discus- 
sion of  these  portions  of  the  drawing  in  his  text,  Rafn  nowhere 
explicitly  says  that  the  shaded  lines  are  additions  by  himself, 
but  misleadingly  calls   the   whole   "The   Rhode   Island   His- 


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THE  NORSE  MYTH  91 

torical  Society's"  drawing.  As  to  the  View,  there  is  nothing 
whatever  in  text  or  in  distinguishing  marks  on  the  drawing  that 
could  lead  one  to  infer  that  he  had  greatly  amplified  and  em- 
bellished what  was  sent  to  him,  hence  he  wrongly  attributes 
it  to  J.  R.  Bartlett  as  its  delineator.  As  a  consequence,  only  the 
most  critical  readers  of  his  text  have  clearly  realized  how  much 
of  the  depicted  inscription  was  due  to  the  actual  observers  of 
the  rock,  and  how  much  was  purely  conjectural ;  and  this  fact 
has  led  to  much  misconception  as  to  the  strength  of  the  argu- 
ment for  the  Norse  theory  of  the  origin  and  meaning  of  the  in- 
scription. Hereafter,  no  one  should  refer  to  either  of  the  two 
drawings  in  the  Antiqititates  Americance  as  those  of  the  Rhode 
Island  Historical  Society.  They  should  evidently  be  known  as 
Rafn's  conjectural  drawings,  based  on  a  comparison  of  the 
Rhode  Island  drawings  with  those  of  earlier  date. 

It  is  a  curious  fact  that  none  of  the  originators  of  the  draw- 
ings, so  far  as  I  have  knowledge  of  their  published  writings  and 
unpublished  letters,  ever  disputed  the  correctness  of  the  date 
that  Rafn  assigned  to  them,  or  the  justice  of  calling  them, 
exactly  as  they  were  published,  the  Rhode  Island  Historical 
Society's  drawings.  Webb  even  came  to  believe  that  the 
shaded  lines  as  well  as  the  others  had  been  drawn  by  his  com- 
mittee. It  has  required  a  careful  study  of  Rafn's  text,  a  com- 
parison of  the  statements  of  nearly  all  the  later  expositors  of 
his  theory,  and  finally  an  examination  of  the  original  records  of 
the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society  and  the  securing  from 
Denmark  of  copies  of  the  original  drawings,  to  make  possible 
a  presentation  of  the  actual  facts. 

The  results  of  Rafn's  studies  were  published  in  1837  in  an 
impressive  volume  entitled  Antiquitates  AmericancB.  Whatever 
may  be  said  of  the  success  of  the  attempt  to  connect  Dighton 
Rock  with  the  visits  of  the  Northmen  to  America,  and  through 
it  or  otherwise  to  identify  localities  connected  with  their  dis- 
coveries, the  service  rendered  by  the  publication  of  the  Antiq- 
uitates Americana  was  a  memorable  one.  The  book  is  a 
quarto  volume  of  526  pages,  illustrated  by  facsimiles  of  some 
of  the  ancient  manuscripts,  by  maps  and  charts,  and  by  six 
engravings  of  Greenland  and  American  monuments.    The  body 


92  DIGHTON  ROCK 

of  the  work  contains  an  Introduction  written  in  Danish  and 
Latin;  a  Conspectus  of  the  eighteen  manuscripts  presented;  a 
twelve-page  essay  written  in  EngHsh  entitled  "America  Dis- 
covered by  the  Scandinavians  in  the  Tenth  Century.  An  Ab- 
stract of  the  Historical  Evidence  Contained  in  this  Work;" 
the  original  text  of  each  of  the  Icelandic  manuscripts  with  a 
Danish  translation  in  parallel  columns  and  a  Latin  translation 
subjoined ;  lengthy  discussions  in  Latin  of  monuments  found  in 
Greenland  and  America;  and  finally,  geographical  annotations 
in  Latin,  and  indexes. 

In  order  to  appreciate  satisfactorily  the  setting  into  which 
the  theory  of  Dighton  Rock  was  fitted,  it  is  necessary  to  review 
briefly  the  story  given  in  the  Historical  Abstract.  Eric  the  Red 
settled  in  Greenland  in  the  spring  of  986.  Later  in  the  same 
year,  Biarne  Heriulfson,  attempting  to  join  Eric's  colony,  was 
driven  out  of  his  course  and  saw  strange  lands  of  three  typically 
different  characters,  but  did  not  go  on  shore.  In  1000,  Leif, 
son  of  Eric,  set  forth  to  discover  Biarne's  new  lands.  The  first 
that  he  found  he  called  Helluland  (identified  by  Rafn  with 
Newfoundland),  the  second,  Markland  (Nova  Scotia),  and  the 
third  Vinland,  because  of  the  wild  grapes  found  there  (vicinity 
of  Cape  Cod  and  Nantucket).  Here  he  erected  large  houses, 
afterwards  called  Leifsbooths  (in  Mount  Hope  Bay),  and  win- 
tered. Thorwald,  Leif's  brother,  sailed  in  1002,  and  passed 
two  winters  at  Leifsbooths.  He  explored  the  country  to  the 
south,  and  gave  the  name  Kialarnes  to  a  prominent  headland 
(Cape  Cod).  He  was  killed  in  a  contest  with  Skrellings,  and 
was  buried  at  Krossanes  (Gurnet  Point).  His  companions 
wintered  once  more  at  Leifsbooths.  In  1005,  Thorstein,  an- 
other son  of  Eric,  made  an  unsuccessful  voyage.  Thorfinn 
Karlsefne,  a  wealthy  and  powerful  man  of  illustrious  lineage, 
went  from  Iceland  to  Greenland  in  1006,  accompanied  by 
Snorre  Thorbrandson,  Biarne  Grimolfson,  and  Thorhall  Gam- 
lason.  Thorfinn  married  Gudrida,  widow  of  Thorstein.  In  the 
spring  of  1007  he  set  sail  in  three  ships  with  his  wife  and  com- 
panions, together  also  with  Thorward  and  his  wife  Freydisa, 
daughter  of  Eric,  and  another  man  named  Thorhall.  They  had 
with  them  160  men  and  much  livestock,  intending  to  establish 


THE  NORSE  MYTH  93 

a  colony.  They  found  all  the  places  already  named,  and  gave 
names  also  to  Furdustrandir  (Wonder  strands;  the  long  sandy 
stretches  of  Cape  Cod),  Straumey  (Stream  Isle;  Martha's 
Vineyard),  and  Straumfiordr  ( Streamfirth ;  Buzzards  Bay). 
At  the  latter  place  they  landed  and  wintered.  Thorhall  with 
eight  men  left  them.  The  others  sailed  southwards  and  arrived 
at  Hop  (Mount  Hope  Bay),  where  they  found  wild  wheat  and 
vines.  They  saw  natives,  erected  dwelling  houses  a  little  above 
the  bay,  and  wintered  there.  No  snow  fell.  In  the  spring  of 
1008  (1009?)  they  traded  with  the  natives,  who  were  fright- 
ened away  by  the  loud  bellowing  of  a  bull.  About  this  time 
Gudrida  gave  birth  to  a  son,  who  was  named  Snorre.  Early 
next  winter  they  were  attacked  by  the  Skrellings,  but  repulsed 
them  after  a  severe  conflict.  In  consequence  of  the  hostility 
of  the  natives,  they  left  Hop,  and  after  some  further  explora- 
tion they  spent  the  third  (fourth?)  winter  at  Streamfirth,  and 
returned  in  1011  to  Greenland.  In  1012-13  another  expedition 
to  Leifsbooths  was  made  under  the  leadership  of  Freydisa. 
Later  voyages  also  occurred,  ending  with  one  to  Markland  in 
1347. 

Rafn  supported  his  identifications  of  localities  by  argu- 
ments drawn  from  geographical  and  nautical  descriptions,  by 
statements  concerning  climate  and  soil,  produce  and  natural  his- 
tory, and  by  an  observation  seeming  to  determine  the  length 
of  day  and  hence  the  latitude.  But  the  most  conclusive  evidence 
that  the  Hop  of  the  Northmen  was  situated  at  the  head  of 
Narragansett  Bay,  he  believed,  is  furnished  by  the  inscription 
on  Dighton  Rock.  Apparently  before  he  had  received  the  new 
drawing  of  1834,  Rafn  submitted  some  or  all  of  the  earlier 
drawings  to  Finn  Magnusen  for  his  opinion  of  them.  Mag- 
nusen's  report,  based  wholly  on  the  Baylies  drawing  of  1789, 
was  as  follows : 

I  am  glad  to  say  that  I  support  unhesitatingly  your  opinion  as 
to  the  inscription  and  figures  on  the  Assonet  rock.  I  believe  there 
is  no  doubt  that  they  are  Icelandic  and  due  to  Thorfinn  Karlsef  ne. 
The  Icelandic  letter  p,  near  the  prow  of  a  ship,  at  the  spectator's 
left,  shows  this  at  first  glance,  as  do  also  the  principal  configura- 
tions cut  in  the  rock.     Several  other  considerations  support  this 


94  DIGHTON  ROCK 

belief.  ...  I.  The  numeral  characters  CXXXI  exactly  corre- 
spond to  the  number  of  Thorfinn's  men ;  for  these  were  CXL,  of 
whom  nine  under  Thorhall  left  him  at  Straumfirth.  With  the 
rest  he  went  to  Hop.  Under  the  numeral  characters  api^ears  the 
combination  "p\Y>  consisting  of  two  letters,  a  Latinogothic  N  and 
a  runic  M/  standing  for  norraenir  (north)  and  menn  or  medr 
(men).  Between  them  is  a  ship  divested  of  masts,  sails  and 
ropes,  indicating  that  these  men  came  to  this  land  in  the  ship  but 
later  left  it  after  removing  its  masts,  sails  and  ropes,  and  erected 
fixed  habitations  on  the  land  occupied  by  them.  The  whole  phrase 
means :  CXXXI  North-European  seamen. 

II.  Following  the  numerals  CXXXI  is  a  Latino-gothic  charac- 
ter resembling  an  M,  the  right-hand  half  of  which  has  a  crossline 
making  it,  taken  by  itself,  an  A.  This  is  a  monogrammatic  com- 
bination standing  for  NAM,  equivalent  to  land-nam.  Underneath 
it  is  a  diamond  shaped  O  followed  by  an  R.  This  OR  is  an 
ancient  Scandinavian  form  for  modern  Icelandic  and  Danish  vor, 
in  English  our.  Nam  or  signifies  "territory  occupied  by  us,"  or 
"our  colonies." — III.  In  the  highest  part  of  the  configuration, 
above  the  portions  just  discussed,  is  a  rather  artificial  figure  repre- 
senting in  our  opinion  a  great  shield  provided  with  a  singular  foot 
resembling  a  fish-tail.  This  shield,  together  with  the  adjacent  in- 
verted helmet,  I  accept  as  symbols  of  the  peaceful  occupation  of 
this  land. — IV.  This  occupation,  or  the  cultivation  of  the  land  or 
development  of  the  colony,  is  further  indicated  by  a  very  crude 
figure  cut  in  the  rock  underneath  the  n  of  norraenir,  if  this,  as 
we  conjecture,  represents  a  heifer  lying  down  or  at  rest.  At  the 
time  of  the  first  occupation  of  Iceland,  the  ground  covered  by 
a  heifer  in  its  wanderings  during  a  summer's  day  customarily 
determined  the  extent  of  the  land  to  be  occupied. — V.  I  believe 
that  the  configuration  as  a  whole  presents  to  the  spectator  this 
scene:  the  famous  ship-  of  Thorfinn  Karlsefne  as  it  first  set  out 
for  Vinland  and  came  to  this  shore,  with  a  wind-vane  attached 
to  the  mast.  His  wife  Gudrida,  seated  on  the  shore,  holds  in  her 
hand  the  key  of  the  conjugal  dwelling,  at  that  time,  as  is  evident, 
long  previously  constructed.     Beside  her  stands  their  three  year 

1  The  former  shaped  like  a  lower-case  n,  the  latter  somewhat  like  a 
trident.  They  are  easily  found  on  the  Baylies  drawing  in  the  position 
indicated. 

2  The  ship  here  mentioned  demands  a  complaisant  imagination  for  its 
recognition  in  the  jumble  of  lines  between  the  P  at  the  extreme  left  of  the 
drawing  and  the  first  human  figure. 


THE  NORSE  MYTH  95 

old  son,  Snorro,  born  in  America.  Thorfinn's  CXXXI  companions 
were  then  occupying  Vinland,  and  had  declared  it  to  be  their  own 
possession,  thus  occupied.  One  of  their  ships  in  which  they  had 
come,  is  represented  fixed  to  the  shore,  for  this  reason  despoiled 
of  its  sails.^  A  cock*  announces  by  his  crowing  domestic  peace, 
as  do  also  the  shield  at  rest  and  the  inverted  helmet.  Then  sud- 
denly approaching  war  is  indicated.  Thorfinn,"  leader  of  the 
colonists,  is  seated,  enjoying  rest;  but  he  seizes  his  shield"  and 
endeavors  to  protect  himself  against  the  approaching  Skrellings,^ 
who  violently  assail  the  Scandinavians,  armed  with  clubs  or 
branches,  with  bow  and  arrows,  and  furthermore  with  a  military 
machine,  unknown  to  us,  which  in  Thorfinn's  history  is  called  a 
ballista,  from  which  are  thrown,  besides  missiles  and  large  rocks 
with  ropes  attached,  as  is  seen,  also  a  huge  ball,  which  fact  is 
testified  to  in  express  words  in  the  same  history.® — VI.  Certain 
other  features  of  the  inscription,  ropes  and  runic  enigmas,  must 
be  left  unexplained. 

Rafn  devotes  42  pages  of  the  Antiqiiitates  Americancs  to  his 
own  discussion  of  Dighton  Rock.  First  he  reproduces  the  let- 
ters which  he  had  received  from  the  Rhode  Island  Historical 
Society,  then  quotes  the  accounts  of  the  rock  that  had  been  pub- 
lished by  Lort,  by  Warden,  and  by  Vallancey.  Since  his  time 
these  sources  have  been  accepted  as  the  basis  of  nearly  all 
accounts  of  the  earlier  history  of  investigation  of  this  subject; 
but  how  inadequate  this  account  is  both  in  accuracy  and  in  com- 
pleteness has  been  shown  constantly  in  the  course  of  our  own 
investigation.  Rafn  then  announces:  "We  are  of  the  opinion 
that  the  inscription  is  due  to  the  Icelanders.  Finn  Magnusen, 
an  expert  in  Runic  inscriptions,  whose  opinion  we  consulted, 
supports  us."    Magnusen's  interpretation  is  presented,  the  nine 

3  This  ship  is  the  one  mentioned  under  I,  between  the  N  and  the  runic  M. 
*This  is  of  course  the  figure  of  the  bird,  at  the  middle  bottom  of  the 
drawing. 

5  The  apparently  human  figure  just  to  the  right  of  the  central  part  of 
the  drawing. 

6  Thorfinn's  shield  is  the  series  of  lines,  to  the  right  of  Thorfinn,  shaped 
like  an  hour-glass  at  the  top,  thence  curving  down  to  a  small  triangle  near 
the  bottom  of  the  human  figure. 

7  The  two  human  figures  at  the  right. 

^All  the  implements  of  war  here  enumerated  can  be  sufficiently  well 
made  out  by  an  active  imagination  between  the  shield  and  the  Skrellings. 


96  DIGHTON  ROCK 

copies  of  the  inscription  known  to  Rafn  are  enumerated,  and 
finally  he  reviews  the  opinions  of  Magnusen  and  adds  correc- 
tions and  amplifications  of  his  own.  Concerning  the  numeral 
characters  CXXXI  in  division  I,  it  will  be  noticed  that  Mag- 
nusen left  them  without  stating  their  equivalence  in  Arabic 
numerals.  Rafn  expresses  the  belief  that  the  C  stands  for  the 
Icelandic  "great  hundred,"  which  is  ten  dozen  instead  of  ten 
tens.  Hence  the  whole  signifies  not  131  but  151,  the  true 
number  of  Thorfinn's  men  after  Thorhall's  nine  had  left.  The 
Gothic  N  and  Runic  M  with  a  dismasted  ship  between  them 
are  to  be  regarded  as  less  certain,  since  they  are  to  be  found 
on  the  Baylies  drawing  only.  Nevertheless,  Magnusen's  ex- 
planation of  them  fits  in  so  well  with  the  numerals,  that  their 
real  existence  at  least  formerly  is  of  the  highest  degree  of 
probability.  Under  II  the  NAM  is  accepted.  But  instead  of 
OR  Rafn  finds  in  the  Rhode  Island  drawing,  supported  in  part 
by  Kendall,  as  we  have  already  seen,  the  fuller  ORFINS. 

In  front  of  these  six  letters  Greenwood's  picture  places  a 
curved  line,  which  is  seen  also,  among  others,  even  in  Mather's 
earlier  drawing.  We  are  not  very  rash  in  suspecting  this  stroke 
to  belong  to  the  letter  p  with  its  first  upright  line  now  exceedingly 
worn  or  even  wholly  invisible.  If  therefore  we  accept  this  letter 
as  having  been  expressed  in  this  place,  or  even  recognize  as  a.  p 
that  letter  which,  though  not  a  little  distant  from  the  succeeding 
letters,  is  yet  visible  in  the  Rhode  Island  Society's  drawing  and  is 
plainly  and  accurately  delineated  in  the  Baylies  drawing  at  the 
first  of  the  representations  of  a  ship,  then  there  results,  according 
to  the  greatest  probabilities,  this  reading  for  the  two  lines  of  the 
inscription,  disregarding  the  numeral  characters : 

NAM  pORFINS. 

The  whole  inscription,  therefore,  reads :  "Thorfinn  and  his 
151  companions  took  possession  of  this  land." 

In  III,  Rafn  accepts  the  interpretation  of  the  figure  as  a 
shield,  and  describes  the  ancient  shields,  of  which  this  is  a  true 
representation.  The  figure  of  a  heifer  in  IV,  given  in  the 
Baylies  and  in  some  part  also  in  the  Rhode  Island  drawing,  is 


THE  NORSE  MYTH  97 

very  different  in  Winthrop.  Its  interpretation  is  subject  to 
doubt,  but  yet  sufficiently  probable.    Rafn  continues : 

V.  The  principal  scenes  of  this  representation  correspond  so 
perfectly  with  the  accounts  in  the  old  Icelandic  writings  that  this 
historical  interpretation  of  their  meaning  is  hardly  to  be  regarded 
as  rash  or  erroneous.  The  arrival  of  the  Scandinavians  in  Vin- 
land,  their  occupation  of  the  land  and  even  their  encounter  with 
the  Skrellings,  are  here  easily  recognized.  The  figure  of  a  man 
standing  in  the  middle  is  given  in  the  Baylies  but  is  lacking  in  the 
more  recent  drawings,  and  hence  is  somewhat  doubtful.  Unless 
this  figure  was  once  there  and  has  since  been  destroyed  by  erosion, 
then  the  human  figure  next  to  the  ship  ought  to  represent  the 
leader  of  the  expedition.  At  his  side  the  best  drawings  show  the 
figure  of  a  child,  which  probably  indicates  Snorre.  ...  In  my 
opinion  this  assumption  is  proven  by  the  fact  that  at  his  right  side 
the  Rhode  Island  drawing  places  the  Runic  letter  S,  initial  of  his 
name.  The  animal,  placed  under  the  upright  shield  in  most  draw- 
ings, is  represented  as  having  horns.  We  take  it  to  represent  the 
bull  which  is  mentioned  in  Thorfinn's  history. 

The  figures  at  the  right,  Rafn  thinks,  are  very  probably 
Eskimos  with  their  weapons :  stretched  bow,  ball  flying  through 
the  air  with  rope  attached,  arrow-head,  and  finally  a  projected 
stone  dashed  against  the  upper  margin  of  the  shield. — VI.  The 
rest  is  too  doubtful  for  correct  interpretation,  though,  as  Mag- 
nusen  says,  there  are  resemblances  to  runic  letters. — VII. 
Other  examples  of  inscriptions  are  cited  in  support  of  the  theory 
here  advocated. 

Following  this  account,  Rafn  describes  the  inscriptions  at 
Portsmouth  and  Tiverton  in  Rhode  Island,  which  confirm  his 
opinion  as  to  Dighton  Rock.  In  short,  as  P.  C.  Sinding  has 
expressed  it,  though  substituting  another  name  for  Thorfinn's, 

No  shore  to  which  the  Northmen  came 
But  kept  some  token  of  their  fame ; 
On  the  rough  surface  of  a  rock. 
Unmoved  by  time  or  tempest's  shock. 
In  Runic  letters,  Thorwald  drew 
A  record  of  his  gallant  crew; 
And  these  rude  letters  still  are  shown 
Deep  chiseled  in  the  flinty  stone. 


98  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Although  not  including  quite  all  the  detail  given  it  by  Rafn, 
yet  the  foregoing  presents  fairly  the  evidence  offered  in  the 
Antiquitates  AmericancB  for  the  famous  Norse  theory  of  the 
inscription  on  Dighton  Rock.  Reserving  for  a  moment  the 
question  as  to  the  presence  there  of  the  name  Thorfinn,  it  is 
clearly  evident  that  all  the  rest  of  the  alleged  translation  is  pure 
romancing,  on  an  exact  par  with  the  detailed  readings  of  Gebe- 
lin,  of  Hill,  and  of  Dammartin.  The  reader  who  has  followed 
the  changing  phases  of  depiction  and  interpretation  of  the 
inscription  thus  far  must  realize  that  it  is  easy  to  imagine  as 
present  on  the  rock  almost  any  desired  letter  of  the  alphabet, 
especially  of  crude  or  early  forms;  and  that,  starting  with 
almost  any  favored  story,  he  can  discover  for  it,  if  he  looks  for 
them  eagerly  enough,  illustrative  images  to  fit  its  various 
features,  and  initial  letters  or  even  entire  words  or  names. 
Later  examples  will  give  even  stronger  confirmation  of  this 
fact. 

Aside  from  an  undoubted  fascination  in  the  thought  of  the 
bold  Norsemen  sailing  without  compass  the  stormy  seas  and 
discovering  and  colonizing  these  shores  so  long  a  time  before 
Columbus,  the  one  thing  that  has  led  to  so  confident,  wide- 
spread and  prolonged  acceptance  of  Rafn's  views  concerning 
Dighton  Rock  has  probably  been  the  apparently  clear  presence 
of  the  name  of  Thorfinn  on  the  rock.  It  is  undeniably  there, 
plainly  visible  to  everyone,  in  Rafn's  seemingly  scholarly  com- 
pilation of  the  different  extant  drawings,  published  in  an  im- 
pressive volume  issued  by  a  highly  reputable  learned  society. 
It  is  hardly  a  matter  for  wonder  that  so  many  persons  have 
seen  no  reason  to  doubt  the  reliability  of  the  depiction.  But  if 
this  one  word  can  be  shown  to  be  doubtful,  or  indubitably  not 
there,  then  the  whole  fabric  of  Rafn's  and  Magnusen's  ingen- 
ious readings  falls  with  it  and  their  translation  of  the  rock's  in- 
scription becomes  as  much  a  fairy  tale  as  are  its  earlier  and  later 
rivals. 

Is  there,  then,  any  possibility  that  the  name  Thorfinn  was 
cut  upon  Dighton  Rock?  We  can  answer  with  entire  con- 
fidence that  there  is  not.  For  one  thing,  no  one,  even  of  those 
eager  to  verify  Rafn's  views,  has  ever  ventured  to  include  it  in 


THE  J^ORSE  MYTH  99 

a  drawing  or  marked  photograph.  Moreover,  anyone  may  now 
prove  the  matter  for  himself  as  completely  as  if  he  were  to  visit 
the  rock  and  examine  it  under  favorable  conditions  of  light 
and  tide.  Study  of  the  photographs  recently  produced  and 
described  on  later  pages  is  for  this  purpose  superior  to  direct 
examination  of  the  rock,  for  they  show  the  smallest  details  of 
texture  of  the  surface  with  almost  ideal  clearness,  and  can  be 
examined  at  leisure  and  in  comfort — conditions  that  the  rock 
itself  rarely  offers.  The  result  of  such  study  must  be  the  con- 
viction that  although  the  actual  lines  are  often  doubtful  yet  the 
conjectural  additions  made  by  Rafn  are  wholly  imaginary, 
corresponding  to  no  actual  markings  on  the  rock,  and  that  an 
entirely  different  name  can  be  read  much  more  plausibly  in  that 
position. 

At  a  later  date  Rafn  added  to  his  "proofs"  of  the  location 
of  Vinland  in  the  region  of  Narragansett  Bay  two  other  objects 
which  played  a  prominent  part  in  subsequent  discussions.  One 
of  these  was  the  Stone  Tower  at  Newport,  now  generally  ac- 
cepted as  without  doubt  Governor  Benedict  Arnold's  "Stone 
Built  Wind  Mill,"  erected  about  1675.  The  other  apparent 
relic  of  the  Northmen  was  the  famous  "Skeleton  in  armor" 
celebrated  by  Longfellow,  discovered  in  Fall  River  in  1831, 
which  no  one  now  hesitates  to  regard  as  that  of  a  commonplace 
Indian. 

In  justice  to  the  men  most  prominently  responsible  for 
introducing  Dighton  Rock  and  these  two  companions  into  the 
story  of  Norse  discoveries,  a  word  should  be  said  as  to  their 
later  expression  of  views.  Already  in  1838,  Rafn  referred  to 
the  evidence  given  in  Antiquitates  AmericancE  merely  as 
"hints,"  and  said  that  the  matter  would  continue  to  form  a 
subject  for  accurate  investigation.  In  a  letter  of  January  4, 
1848,  to  David  Melville  of  Newport  he  said  that  these  monu- 
ments "unquestionably  merit  the  attention  of  the  investigator, 
but  we  must  be  cautious  in  regard  to  the  inferences  to  be  drawn 
from  them."  Yet  his  letters  to  Niels  Arnzen  between  1859  and 
1861,  in  which  he  approves  of  a  project  to  remove  Dighton 
Rock  to  Denmark,  show  that  he  still  regards  it  as  of  "high 
and  pressing  importance."     The  Royal  Society  of  Northern 


100  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Antiquaries,  however,  eventually  abandoned  all  belief  in  the 
value  of  the  rock  as  evidence,  as  is  shown  by  a  letter  of 
February  22,  1877,  addressed  to  Arnzen,  signed  by  four  offi- 
cials in  behalf  of  the  government  of  the  society,  and  by  a  letter 
of  November  1,  1878,  from  the  Society's  vice-president,  J.  J. 
A.  Warsaae,  to  Charles  Rau.  The  official  letter  to  Arnzen 
says :  "The  Society  must  confess  that  the  inscribed  figures  on 
the  Rock  have,  according  to  the  later  investigations,  no  connec- 
tion with  the  Northmen's  journeys  of  discovery  or  sojourn  in 
America,  but  rather  that  it  is  the  work  of  the  original  races  of 
Indians."  Bartlett,  in  1846,  expressed  his  belief  that  no  alpha- 
betic characters  had  been  satisfactorily  identified  on  Dighton 
Rock;  and  many  years  later  he  wrote:  "I  never  believed  that  it 
was  the  work  of  the  Northmen  or  of  any  other  foreign  visitors. 
My  impression  was,  and  is  still,  that  it  was  the  work  of  our  own 
Indians.  .  .  .  Nor  do  I  concur  ...  in  the  belief  that  it  was 
intended  as  a  record  of  any  kind."  Webb  apparently  clung 
persistently  to  the  belief  that  the  inscription  was  Norse,  yet 
conceded  that  it  might  be  otherwise:  "If  its  anti-Runic  char- 
acter should  be  satisfactorily  shown,"  and  "allowing  it  to  be  an 
Indian  Monument,  it  should  be  none  the  less  highly  prized  and 
carefully  preserved." 

It  is  now  generally  conceded  by  everyone  whose  opinion  is 
of  value  that  no  material  remains  of  the  Norse  visits  to  America 
have  ever  been  discovered.  The  whole  matter  is  well  summed 
up  by  Babcock : 

So  far  as  investigation  has  gone,  there  is  not  a  single  known 
record  or  relic  of  Wineland,  Markland,  Helluland,  or  any  Norse 
or  Icelandic  voyage  of  discovery,  extant  at  this  time  on  American 
soil,  which  may  be  relied  on  with  any  confidence.  One  and  all 
they  may  perfectly  well  be  of  some  other  origin — Indian,  Basque, 
Breton,  Norman,  Dutch,  Portuguese,  French,  Spanish,  or  English. 
Too  many  natives  were  on  the  ground,  and  too  many  different 
European  peoples,  who  were  not  Scandinavians,  came  here  be- 
tween 1497  and  1620  for  us  to  accept  anything  as  belonging  to  or 
left  by  a  Norse  Wineland,  without  unimpeachable  proof. 

Accustomed  as  we  now  are  to  accepting  the  possibility  that 
not  only  the  Northmen,  but  perhaps  voyagers  on  many  other 


THE  NORSE  MYTH  101 

unprovable  occasions  saw  the  shores  of  America  before  Colum- 
bus did,  it  is  hard  to  realize  what  a  tremendous  impression 
was  made  by  the  appearance  of  the  Antiquitates  Americancs. 
Edward  Everett  wrote,  immediately  on  receiving  it:  "This  is 
a  work  of  great  interest.  It  has  long  been  expected  with  im- 
patience." Higginson  tells  us:  "I  can  well  remember,  as  a 
boy,  the  excitement  produced  among  the  Harvard  professors 
when  the  ponderous  volume  made  its  appearance  upon  the 
library  table.  ...  To  tell  the  tale  in  its  present  form  gives 
very  little  impression  of  the  startling  surprise  with  which  it 
came  before  the  community  of  scholars  nearly  half  a  century 
ago." 

The  book  immediately,  and  for  long  after,  was  discussed 
in  numerous  reviews  and  magazines.  Rafn's  historical  account 
in  English  was  republished  at  least  twenty  times  in  eleven  dif- 
ferent languages.  Lectures  on  the  subject  were  delivered  by 
men  of  prominence  like  Governor  Edward  Everett,  A.  H. 
Everett,  and  George  Folsom,  as  well  as  by  others  less  well 
known.  Leading  scholars  and  historians  took  account  of  it, 
and  only  Irving  and  Bancroft  were  wholly  hostile  to  Rafn's 
conclusions,  of  whom  Irving  later  somewhat  modified  his 
opinion  and  Bancroft  eventually  withdrew  opposition  by 
omitting  from  his  History  any  reference  to  the  subject.  The 
story  of  the  sagas  was  retold  in  a  more  compact  form  by  several 
writers. 

Such  was  the  immediate  effect  of  the  book.  With  the  con- 
tent of  the  many  discussions  and  controversies  which  it  has 
inspired  since  then,  we  cannot  further  concern  ourselves,  except 
in  so  far  as  they  involve  new  features  in  the  unfolding  of  opin- 
ion about  Dighton  Rock. 

One  of  the  best  of  early  opinions  was  that  expressed  by 
Edward  Everett  in  a  review  of  Antiquitates  and  in  a  lecture 
before  the  Massachusetts  Historical  Society.  He  said  that  the 
copies  of  the  inscription  were  too  unlike  to  command  entire 
confidence,  declared  that  he  remained  wholly  unconvinced  of  the 
truth  of  the  Norse  interpretation,  and  questioned,  without 
undertaking  a  positive  decision,  why  it  may  not  have  been 


102  DIGHTON  ROCK 

wrought  by  Indians  between  1620  and  1675,  or  even  by  some 
Anglo-American  in  that  period. 

Alexander  H.  Everett  believed  that  the  Norse  settlement  on 
Mount  Hope  Bay  was  "beyond  controversy,"  even  though 
"throwing  out  of  view  all  the  evidence  that  may  be  regarded  as 
in  any  way  doubtful,  such  as  .  .  .  the  inscription  on  Dighton 
Rock."  The  Rev.  A.  B.  Chapin  exhibited  a  not  uncommon 
type  of  poor  reasoning:  it  is  plain  that  the  Indians  did  not 
inscribe  the  letters ;  either,  then,  the  Norse  view  is  correct,  or 
they  are  a  forgery ;  and  the  latter  view  is  altogether  improbable. 
Schoolcraft  well  expressed  one  of  the  early  opinions  adverse  to 
Rafn's  conclusions,  regarding  the  characters  as  Indian  hiero- 
glyphics, easily  producible  by  their  stone  implements,  and  be- 
lieving that  "it  would  be  hazarding  little  to  suppose  that  some 
idle  boy,  or  more  idle  man,  had  superadded  these  English,  or 
Roman  characters,  in  sport." 

How  strongly  the  new  theories  appealed  to  the  popular 
fancy  is  evidenced  by  the  success  of  two  uncritical  books  that 
appeared  within  a  short  time  after  the  publication  of  the  Antiq- 
uitates.  In  1839  Joshua  T.  Smith  published  the  Northmen  in 
New  England.  It  shows  no  originality  aside  from  putting  its 
exposition  and  defence  of  Rafn's  views  in  a  rather  prolix  and 
uninteresting  dialogue  form,  of  no  present  value  except  as  a 
curiosity  of  the  literature  of  the  subject.  A  much  more  strik- 
ing comment  on  popular  taste  is  afforded  by  the  long  continued 
demand  for  a  small  treatise  by  the  Rev.  Asahel  Davis,  "Chap- 
lain of  the  Senate  of  New  York,"  as  he  is  styled  in  some  edi- 
tions. Its  first  edition  appeared  apparently  in  1838;  the  second 
edition,  of  1839,  is  a  small  pamphlet  of  sixteen  pages;  its  size 
gradually  increased  in  successive  editions  to  somewhat  more 
than  double  that  number.  It  is  exceedingly  ill-written,  fre- 
quently ungrammatical,  made  up  of  choppy  paragraphs  of 
poorly  selected  and  ill-balanced  material  taken  with  uncritical 
faith  from  the  Bible,  from  reports  such  as  that  of  an  extinct 
race  of  men  nine  feet  in  height  whose  remains  have  been  found 
in  various  states,  and  from  Rafn.  Yet  ten  editions  had  been 
called  for  by  1842,  ten  more  within  the  next  six  years,  and  a 
thirtieth  thousand  is  reported  to  have  been  issued  in   1854. 


THE  NORSE  MYTH  103 

Bancroft  and  Irving,  in  1840  and  1841,  agreed  that  "calm 
observers,  in  the  vicinity  of  the  sculptured  rock,  see  nothing  in 
the  design  beyond  the  capacity  of  the  red  man  of  New  Eng- 
land;" and  that  it  was  equally  easy  to  imaginatively  read  in  its 
Algonquin  characters  the  semblance  of  Phoenician,  Egyptian 
or  Scandinavian  writing,  or  anything  else  desired. 

On  the  opposing  side.  Beamish  says  all  that  could  be  said 
for  a  Norse  Dighton  Rock  by  referring  to  the  "unanswerable 
arguments"  of  Professor  Rafn,  which,  he  claims,  leave  "no 
reasonable  doubt  as  to  its  being  the  work  of  the  Northmen." 
His  work  as  a  whole  may  have  been  worthy  of  the  republication 
which  it  received,  but  the  part  wherein  he  comments  on  the 
rock  shows  a  careless  and  inaccurate  reading  of  his  sources 
such  as  has  often  characterized  the  advocates  of  startling 
theories  about  this  inscription. 

Samuel  Laing  devoted  a  dozen  pages  of  sharp  and  for  the 
most  part  justifiable  criticism  to  the  subject  of  Dighton  Rock 
and  the  Newport  windmill  in  his  Heimskringia  of  1844.  Be- 
sides suggesting  natural  veining  of  the  rock  and  deliberate 
fraud  as  possibilities,  he  justly  says  that  the  marks  resembling 
letters  may  not  be  letters  at  all,  but  merely  scratches,  marks  or 
initials,  made  at  various  times  by  various  hands;  and  that  in- 
terpretation may  assign  them  to  any  people  or  period  one  may 
please  to  fancy.  In  the  same  year  appeared  the  first  German 
book,  so  far  as  I  have  observed,  devoted  to  the  Norse  dis- 
coveries— by  Karl  H.  Hermes,  who  concludes  that  the  rock 
testifies  indubitably  and  unambiguously  to  the  presence  of  the 
Northmen.  Paul  Guillot's  translation  into  French  of  Whea- 
ton's  History  of  the  Northmen  also  appeared  in  1844,  and  the 
translator  in  his  notes  accepted  the  inscription  as  having  been 
proved  to  be  Norse. 

I.  A.  Blackwell,  writing  in  1847,  thinks  that  Rafn  "might 
have  spared  us  a  great  deal  of  learned  trifling"  by  omitting  his 
dissertation  on  the  inscribed  rocks.  "The  Dighton  Rock  is 
covered  with  tortuous  lines  which  may  be  made  to  mean  any 
thing  or  nothing,  and  which  after  all  the  noise  that  has  been 
made  about  them  may  probably  be  the  handiwork  of  one 
of  old  Sachem  Philip's  Wampanoag  Indians."     Herein,  we 


104  DIGHTON  ROCK 

have  seen,  he  was  expressing  the  opinion  of  a  great  many  of 
his  predecessors.  Thus  far,  however,  there  was  but  Httle  more 
knowledge  of  Indian  handiwork  in  the  making  of  petroglyphs, 
that  might  serve  as  a  sound  basis  for  such  opinions,  than  had 
been  expressed  by  Kendall  in  1807,  depending  largely  on  the 
observations  of  Dr.  Stiles.  The  publication  of  the  Ancient 
Monuments  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  by  E.  G.  Squier  and  E. 
H.  Davis  in  1847  gave  new  arguments  to  the  anti-Norse  fac- 
tion; and  in  1848  Squier  minutely  examined  "the  alleged  monu- 
mental evidence  of  the  discovery  of  America  by  the  Northmen," 
and  said  that  on  comparing  Dighton  Rock  with  many  known 
Indian  petroglyphs,  "the  conclusion  will  be  irresistible  that  this 
particular  rock  is  a  true  Indian  monument,  and  has  no  extra- 
ordinary significance."  As  to  the  Norse  discoveries,  "there  is 
nothing  which  has  tended  so  much  to  weaken  the  force  of  the 
arguments  which  have  been  advanced  in  support  of  that  claim 
in  the  minds  of  those  acquainted  with  the  antiquities  of  our 
country,  as  the  stress  which  has  been  laid  on  this  rude  inscrip- 
tion." 

Argument  by  ridicule  is  often  more  effective  than  more 
direct  attacks.  This  method  found  expression  in  the  "Anti- 
quarian hoax"  of  1847,  the  contributions  to  which  were  later 
assembled  by  C.  T.  Brooks.  With  the  utmost  solemnity,  and 
no  indication  that  his  statements  were  not  to  be  taken  seriously 
except  the  veiled  one  implied  in  his  use  of  high-sounding  and 
meaningless  names  and  descriptions  of  non-existent  incidents, 
a  writer  who  signed  himself  "Antiquarian,  Brown  University" 
claimed  that  the  characters  were  Furdo  Argyto  Dnostick,  were 
made  by  an  ancient  race  supposed  to  be  ^gypto-Drosticks,  and 
were  discovered  and  described  by  the  Northmen.  His  pom- 
pously worded  absurdities  were  so  mingled  with  statements  of 
fact  that  they  were  at  first  sight  not  easy  completely  to  expose. 
Lowell's  caricature  of  the  Norse  theory  in  the  Biglow  Papers 
is  amusing  and  should  be  read  in  full  if  one  would  follow 
exhaustively  the  fortunes  of  our  rock. 

We  have  assembled  now  practically  all  of  the  typical  argu- 
ments on  either  side.  For  the  Norse  hypothesis  there  has  really 
never  been  anything  to  say  except  to  express  a  faith  that  Rafn 


THE  NORSE  MYTH  105 

was  right.  On  the  other  side,  apart  from  presentation  of  a 
rival  theory,  or  from  constantly  growing  knowledge  of  the 
details  of  Indian  customs  and  workmanship,  to  examination  of 
which  we  shall  turn  shortly,  there  was  little  to  do  except  to 
point  out  the  inadequacies  of  the  evidence  in  favor  of  Scan- 
dinavian artists. 

Although  preserving  many  of  the  essential  features  of 
Rafn's  treatment,  a  translation  offered  by  Gabriel  Gravier  in 
1874  possesses  enough  of  novelty  to  need  separate  mention. 
The  author  gives  a  fairly  good  survey  of  earlier  opinions,  and 
reproduces  Rafn's  version  of  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  So- 
ciety's drawing.  His  originality  consists  largely  in  asserting 
that  when  Thorfinn  sailed  from  Straum fjord  he  left  there 
twenty  men  and  consequently,  since  nine  others  had  gone  off 
with  Thorhall,  had  but  131  with  him  at  Hop.  The  inscription 
is  so  read  as  to  give  evidence  of  this.  At  the  extreme  left  of 
the  drawing  is  seen  the  number  XX,  followed  by  a  long  wavy 
descending  line  which  he  regards  as  the  rune  kaiin,  and  below 
these  a  P-like  character,  which  he  interprets  as  the  Icelandic 
than,  signifying  a  ship.  The  kaitn  means  "enflure,"  a  dwelling 
at  the  foot  of  a  hill ;  and  its  irregular  prolongation  indicates  the 
path  that  was  followed  between  the  ship  and  the  dwelling. 
Thus  are  indicated  the  conditions  at  Straum  fjord.  The 
CXXXT  has  its  usual  significance,  instead  of  the  forced  mean- 
ing of  151  which  Rafn  assigned  to  it.  The  next  following 
character,  |V|,  is  accepted,  in  accordance  with  its  interpretation 
by  Magnusen  and  Rafn,  as  being  a  monogrammatic  NAM, 
meaning  "occupation  of  a  country."  Gravier  naturally  fails  to 
discover  Magnusen's  "Norse  seamen,"  since  that  occurs  only  on 
the  Baylies  drawing.  In  its  place,  he  takes  the  inverted  Y  which 
follows  the  M  as  the  rune  madr,  meaning  men.  The  than  of 
the  name  Thorfinn  he  thinks  has  been  effaced  by  rain  and  tide, 
and  for  the  rest  of  the  name  he  accepts  Rafn's  version.  The 
human  figures  toward  the  left  are  Gudrida  and  Snorre,  the 
latter  confirmed  by  the  neighboring  rune  sol,  in  accordance  with 
Rafn's  belief.  The  animal  is  the  famous  bull.  The  two  per- 
sonages at  the  right,  however,  are  not  Skrellings,  but  Thor- 
finn Karlsefne  and  his  friend  Snorre  Thorbrandson. 


106  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Instead  of  one  Norse  reading,  therefore,  there  have  been 
three  more  or  less  differing  ones  suggested.  Their  general 
purport  is  very  similar.  Although  Magnusen's  and  Rafn's  dif- 
fer markedly  only  in  the  interpretation  of  the  OR,  yet  all  three 
wholly  agree  only  in  the  meaning  assigned  to  the  monogram- 
matic  Mj  and  to  the  figures  of  Gudrida  and  her  son.  Gravier's 
version  made  little  impression,  having  been  noticed  by  only  a 
few  reviewers  and  other  writers.  Still  another  minor  variant 
reading  was  given  by  a  certain  E.  Fales  in  1888:  "Thorfinn 
Karlsefne  in  the  ship  Arrow  landed  here  with  151  persons  and 
took  possession."  He  does  not  say  whence  he  derives  the  name 
of  the  ship.  His  discussion,  however,  is  ignorant  and  worth- 
less. 

Though  we  must  now  take  leave  of  Thorfinn  and  his  151 
companions,  his  Skrellings  and  his  terror-inspiring  bull,  yet  the 
debate  for  and  against  him  has  continued  intricately  through 
the  years.  Numerous  champions  possessed  of  well-known 
names  have  arisen,  and  numerous  equally  well-known  oppo- 
nents. There  is  constant  interest  and  occasional  humor  await- 
ing anyone  who  may  wish  to  follow  the  controversy  in  all  of  its 
successive  phases. 

As  a  final  word,  we  may  recall  how  strongly  this  theory  of 
the  rock  has  appealed  to  the  imagination,  and  how  many  in- 
stances we  have  taken  notice  of  wherein  the  exercise  of  this 
faculty  has  tempted  to  an  expression  of  opinion  many  who 
were  utterly  unequipped  in  knowledge  or  judgment  to  say  any- 
thing about  it  worth  printing,  and  has  led  astray  others  better 
equipped  into  the  adoption  of  an  unscientific  attitude  on  the 
subject.  It  is  not  surprising  to  realize,  therefore,  that  the 
romance  and  fascination  of  this  theme  have  stirred  the  ardor 
of  a  number  of  poets.  William  E.  Richmond  and  P.  C.  Sind- 
ing  have  already  been  cited.  Daniel  Ricketson  contributed  a 
long  poem  on  Dighton  Rock  to  the  New  Bedford  Mercury  on 
May  4,  1839.  Longfellow  felt  the  inspiration.  John  Hay 
made  a  humorous  allusion  to  the  difficulty  of  the  Dighton  runes 
in  his  class-day  poem,  "Erato,"  in  1858.  Sidney  Lanier  ac- 
cepted the  truth  of  Rafn's  story  in  his  "Psalm  of  the  West" : 


THE  NORSE  MYTH  107 

Then  Leif,  bold  son  of  Eric  the  Red, 
To  the  South  of  the  West  doth  flee — 
Past  slaty  Helluland  is  sped, 
Past   Markland's  woody  lea, 
Till  round  about  fair  Vinland's  head, 
Where  Taunton  helps  the  sea,  ... 
They  lift  the  Leifsbooth's  hasty  walls 
They  stride  about  the  land. 

And  another  of  America's  well-loved  singers  made  allusion  to 
a  rival  Northman's  Written  Rock  in  his  "Double-headed  Snake 
of  Newbury,"  and  devoted  an  entire  poem  to  the  Norsemen  and 
their  supposed  visit  to  New  England,  a  few  of  whose  appreci- 
ative lines  may  well  close  this  portion  of  our  history : 

My  spirit  bows  in  gratitude 
Before  the  Giver  of  all  good, 
Who  fashioned  so  the  human  mind 
That,  from  the  waste  of  Time  behind, 
A  simple  stone,  or  mound  of  earth. 
Can  summon  the  departed  forth ; 
Quicken  the  Past  to  life  again. 
The  Present  lose  in  what  hath  been. 
And  in  their  primal  freshness  show 
The  buried  forms  of  long  ago.^ 

oWhittier,  Complete  Poetical  Works  (1894),  pp.  9-11. 


CHAPTER  VII 

DEVELOPMENT    OF    THE    INDIAN    THEORY 

Side  by  side  with  the  Norse  theory  there  developed,  with 
increasing  detail  and  growing  confidence,  the  opinion  that  the 
inscription  was  wrought  by  no  others  than  the  aboriginal  inhabi- 
tants of  the  country.  It  may  seem  strange  that  this,  the  most 
natural  view  of  all,  should  not  have  prevailed  from  the  first. 
In  fact,  it  had  a  few  supporters  as  well  as  many  opponents  in  the 
periods  surveyed  in  our  earlier  chapters.  But,  as  Higginson 
remarked  in  1882,  "so  long  as  men  believed  with  Dr.  Webb 
that  'nowhere  throughout  our  widespread  domain  is  a  single 
instance  of  their  having  recorded  their  deeds  or  history  on 
stone,'  it  was  quite  natural  to  look  to  some  unknown  race  for 
the  origin  of  this  single  inscription." 

This,  however,  was  not  the  only  reason  advanced  by  Dr. 
Webb  for  his  disbelief  in  the  responsibility  of  the  Indians.  In 
his  letter  of  September  22,  1830,  we  find  tlic  following  state- 
ment, which  is  typical  of  the  arguments  for  this  opinion : 

In  the  Western  parts  of  our  Country  may  still  be  seen  numer- 
ous and  extensive  mounds,  similar  to  the  tumuli  met  with  in  Scan- 
dinavia, Tartary  and  Russia;  also  the  remains  of  Fortifications, 
that  must  have  required  for  their  construction,  a  degree  of  in- 
dustry, labour  and  skill,  as  well  as  an  advancement  in  the  Arts, 
that  never  characterized  any  of  the  Indian  tribes :  Various  articles 
of  Pottery  are  found  in  them,  with  the  method  of  manufacturing 
which  they  were  entirely  unacquainted.  But,  above  all,  many 
rocks,  inscribed  with  unknown  characters,  apparently  of  very 
ancient  origin,  have  been  discovered,  scattered  through  different 
parts  of  the  Country :  Rocks,  the  constituent  parts  of  which  are 
such  as  to  render  it  almost  impossible  to  engrave  on  them  such 
writings,  without  the  aid  of  Iron,  or  other  hard  metallic  instru- 
ments. The  Indians  were  ignorant  of  the  existence  of  these  rocks, 
and  the  manner  of  working  with  Iron  they  learned  of  the  Euro- 

108 


DEVELOPMENT  OF  INDIAN  THEORY        109 

peans  after  the  settlement  of  the  Country  by  the  English.  .  .  . 
No  one,  who  examines  attentively  the  workmanship  [of  Dighton 
Rock],  will  believe  it  to  have  been  done  by  the  Indians.  Moreover, 
it  is  a  well  attested  fact,  that  no  where,  throughout  our  widespread 
domain,  is  a  single  instance  of  their  recording  or  having  recorded 
their  deeds  or  history,  on  Stone. 

Webb  still  held  to  this  belief  nearly  twenty-five  years  later, 
although  in  the  meantime  he  had  himself  seen  many  "marked 
rocks"  on  the  Mexican  border.  "A  popular  error,  once  started 
on  its  career,  is  as  hard  to  kill  as  a  cat,"  is  the  way  in  which 
John  Fiske  expressed  his  view  of  the  situation.  How  the  error 
has  been  killed,  and  the  Indians  proved  entirely  capable  of  hav- 
ing made  the  Dighton  petroglyph,  we  have  now  to  trace. 

George  Catlin  made  one  of  the  earliest  definite  contribu- 
tions, in  1841.  He  had  traveled  widely,  and  had  seen  a  "vast 
many"  of  Indian  picture-writings.  "I  have  satisfied  myself  that 
they  are  generally  merely  the  totems  or  symbolic  names,  such 
as  birds,  beasts,  or  reptiles,  of  Indians  who  have  visited  these 
places  and,  from  a  feeling  of  vanity,  recorded  their  names  as 
white  men  are  in  the  habit  of  doing  at  watering  places." 

An  important  extension  of  knowledge  in  regard  to  Indian 
petroglyphs  was  due  to  the  work  of  Squier  between  1846  and 
1860.  The  earliest  evidence  of  his  interest  in  Dighton  Rock  is 
furnished  by  his  unpublished  letters  to  Bartlett.  In  the  course 
of  one  of  them  he  mentions  it,  and  says  of  other  sculptured 
rocks  that  he  is  investigating:  "There  will  be  no  difficulty  in 
making  German  or  Runic,  or  Latin,  or  Choctaw  out  of  them." 
His  first  publication,  made  in  collaboration  with  E.  H.  Davis, 
was  on  the  ancient  monuments  of  the  Mississippi  Valley.  In 
it  he  describes  many  pictographs,  and  remarks  that  those  at 
Dighton,  Tiverton,  and  Portsmouth  "do  not  seem  to  diflfer 
materially  in  character"  from  these.  Shortly  afterwards,  he 
devoted  an  entire  paper  to  the  refutation  of  the  Norse  claim 
to  Dighton  Rock.  He  omitted  any  reference  to  the  rock,  but 
discussed  the  Fall  River  skeleton,  in  his  Aboriginal  Monuments 
of  the  State  of  New  York,  in  1849.  He  returned  to  the  sub- 
ject briefly  and  finally  in  a  paper  of  1860,  wherein,  speaking 
of  the  Runic,  Hebrew,  and  Phoenician  theories,  he  remarks: 


no  DIGHTON  ROCK 

"Of  late  years,  however,  reveries  of  this  kind  have  been  gen- 
erally discarded,  and  the  investigations  of  our  monuments  con- 
ducted on  more  rational  and  scientific  principles." 

Squier's  Ethnological  Journal  paper  of  1848  is  worthy  of 
fuller  notice.  After  a  minute  description  of  Dighton  Rock 
and  the  "fanciful  speculations"  which  have  been  based  upon 
it,  he  argues  that  the  rock — 

coincides  in  position  with  a  large  number  of  similar  monuments  in 
various  parts  of  the  country,  which  bear  inscriptions,  not  only 
similar,  but  identical  in  style  and  workmanship ;  that  some  of  these 
are  known  to  have  been  inscribed  by  the  existing  Indian  tribes, 
since  the  period  of  the  commencement  of  European  intercourse, 
and  that  it  was  and  still  is  a  common  practice  among  the  Indians 
to  delineate  on  trees  and  rocks  rude  outline  pictures  commemora- 
tive of  the  dead,  or  of  some  extraordinary  event,  as  the  conclusion 
of  a  treaty,  or  the  termination  of  a  successful  hunting  or  martial 
expedition ;  then  the  conclusion  will  be  irresistible  that  this  par- 
ticular rock  is  a  true  Indian  monument,  and  has  no  extraordinary 
significance. 

All  of  the  sculptured  rocks,  he  continues, — 

are  clearly  within  the  capabilities  of  the  Indian  tribes,  by  whom 
they  were  doubtless  inscribed.  Their  tools,  though  rude,  are, 
nevertheless,  adequate  to  the  chipping  of  nearly  every  variety  of 
rock  to  the  slight  depth  required  in  these  rude  memorials.  Besides, 
a  personal  examination  of  these  rocks  enables  us  to  say  that  the 
amount  of  labor  expended  upon  the  largest  rock  of  the  Guyandotte 
group,  making  proper  allowance  for  the  difference  of  material, 
is  five-fold  greater  than  that  expended  on  the  rock  at  Dighton.  .  .  . 
The  time,  however,  expended  upon  these  rocks,  in  the  process  of 
inscribing  them,  is  a  matter  of  no  consequence  among  a  people 
who  had  so  great  an  abundance  to  spare  as  the  Indian.  The  labor 
expended  in  reducing  to  shaj^e  and  polishing  some  of  their  hatchets 
and  other  implements  of  hornblende,  greenstone,  and  kindred 
materials,  was  probably  little  less  than  that  bestowed  upon  the 
most  elaborate  of  the  sculptured  rocks. 

Although  Schoolcraft  expressed  four  dififering  opinions  within 
the  space  of  fifteen  years,  yet  on  the  whole  he  helped  materially 
toward  progress  in  clearing  the  mystery  of  the  rock.     Brinton 


•^^ 


^  1  J 


^^^ 


00 


WDi 


DEVELOPMENT  OF  INDIAN  THEORY        111 

regarded  him  as  a  "man  of  deficient  education  and  narrow 
prejudices,  pompous  in  style  and  inaccurate  in  statements,"  and 
his  views  as  "shallow  and  untrustworthy  in  the  extreme." 
However,  Mallery's  judgment  that  Schoolcraft  told  the  truth 
in  substance,  although  with  much  exaggeration  and  coloring, 
applies  well  to  his  final  attitude  toward  this  inscription;  for 
although  the  detailed  translation  that  he  advocated  has  no  claim 
to  acceptance,  yet  he  exerted  a  wholesome  influence  in  attribut- 
ing it  to  Indian  sources.  Schoolcraft  also  has  the  distinction 
of  being  responsible  for  the  production  of  the  first  published 
photographic  representation  of  the  rock. 

In  1839,  in  a  paper  already  quoted,  Schoolcraft  expressed 
opinions  entirely  hostile  to  the  Norse  theory,  asserting  that  the 
characters  on  the  rock  are  Indian  hieroglyphics  of  the  Algic 
stamp.  At  about  the  same  time  he  sent  to  Rafn  an  account  of 
a  "Runic  inscription,"  that  of  the  stone  found  in  the  Grave 
Creek  mound,  now  regarded  as  probably  fraudulent.  On 
November  17,  1846,  he  delivered  an  address  before  the  New 
York  Historical  Society,  showing  a  then  wavering  opinion. 
Regarding  Massachusetts  and  Rhode  Island  as  plausible  locali- 
ties of  the  Norse  discoveries,  he  deplored  the  insistence  on 
"localities  and  monuments,  which  we  are  by  no  means  sure 
ever  had  any  connection  with  the  early  Scandinavian  adven- 
turers." At  a  meeting  of  the  same  society  on  November  3,  at 
his  suggestion,  a  committee  was  appointed  "to  investigate  the 
character  and  purport  of  the  ancient  pictorial  inscription  or 
symbolic  figures  of  the  (so  called)  Dighton  Rock,  with  instruc- 
tions to  visit  the  same  and  report  thereon  to  the  Society,"  but 
there  is  no  record  that  a  report  was  ever  submitted.  But  School- 
craft visited  the  rock  in  August,  1847,  and  made  a  drawing  of 
such  of  its  characters  as  were  in  the  position  where  Rafn  had 
imagined  the  name  Thorfinn.  His  version  differs  considerably 
from  any  others,  and  to  the  writer  seems  to  have  no  better 
claim  to  accuracy  than  they.  It  can  be  seen  as  Figure  E  of  our 
Figure  15, 

Meanwhile,  in  1839,  Schoolcraft  had  submitted  to  Ching- 
wauk,  a  well-known  Algonquin  priest  and  chief  and  an  expert 
in  the  reading  of  Indian  picture-writings,  the  drawings  of 


112  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Baylies  and  of  Rafn.  Selecting  the  former  only,  Chingwauk 
had  furnished  him  with  a  detailed  translation  of  all  of  its  parts, 
except  the  central  characters;  and  he  made  a  first  announce- 
ment of  this  translation  in  an  unpublished  paper  read  sometime 
between  1842  and  1845.  In  1851,  Schoolcraft  published  the 
first  volume  of  his  History  of  the  Indian  Tribes,  in  which  he 
devoted  over  a  dozen  pages  to  a  description  of  Dighton  Rock 
and  a  presentation  of  this  new  reading.  It  was  accompanied 
by  a  plate  reproducing  the  Baylies  drawing  of  1789,  to  which 
a  few  characters  from  Rafn's  version  of  the  1834  drawing  had 
been  added  (Figure  15)  ;  and  by  a  second  plate,  which  he  called 
a  synopsis  of  the  Assonet  Inscription,  displaying  the  several 
figures  and  characters  detached  from  one  another  and  arranged 
in  separate  compartments  of  a  square.  On  each  plate  he  in- 
cludes a  separate  figure,  showing  his  own  rendering  of  the  cen- 
tral characters.  We  shall  postpone  for  separate  treatment  the 
interpretation  by  Chingwauk,  and  present  here  only  a  much  con- 
densed account  of  Schoolcraft's  own  conclusions : 

That  America  was  visited  early  in  the  tenth  century  by  the 
adventurous  Northmen  is  generally  admitted.  Their  Vinland  has 
been  shown,  with  much  probability,  to  have  comprised  the  present 
area  of  Massachusetts  and  Rhode  Island.  But  the  Assonet  monu- 
ment has  been  misinterpreted.  Two  distinct  and  separate  inscrip- 
tions appear  on  it,  of  which  it  is  evident  that  the  Icelandic  is  the 
most  ancient.  The  central  space  which  it  occupies  could  not  have 
been  left,  if  the  face  of  the  rock  had  previously  been  occupied  by 
the  Indian  or  pictographic  part.  The  want  of  European  symbols 
— such  as  hats,  swords,  etc. — connected  with  the  figures  represent- 
ing the  defeated  enemy  makes  it  hardly  probable  that  this  is  a 
record  of  the  defeat  of  the  Northmen  by  the  Algonquins ;  yet  it 
is  possible.  The  inscription  was  more  likely,  as  is  shown  by  Ching- 
wauk, a  triumph  of  native  against  native. 

The  rock  was  visited  in  August,  1847,  in  execution  of  the  in- 
structions of  the  New  York  Historical  Society.  Observation  was 
rendered  somewhat  unsatisfactory,  because  of  a  light  marine  scum 
deposited  by  the  water  on  the  rock's  surface.  It  was  evident, 
under  all  the  difficulties  of  tidal  deposit  and  obscure  figures,  that 
there  were  two  diverse  and  wholly  distinct  characters  employed, 
namely,  an  Algonquin  and  an  Icelandic  inscription.     No  copy  of 


DEVELOPMENT  OF  INDIAN  THEORY        113 

it,  answering  the  highest  requisites  of  exactitude,  has,  in  my  opin- 
ion, appeared.  The  principles  of  lithological  inscription,  as  they 
have  been  developed  in  ancient  Iceland,  appear  to  me  to  sanction 
the  reference  of  the  upper  line  of  the  foreign  inscription  to  the 
hardy  adventurous  Northmen,  Thus  read,  the  interpretation  of 
this  part  of  the  inscription  furnished  by  Mr.  Magnusen,  appears 
to  be  fully  sustained.  Put  in  modern  characters,  it  is  this  : 
CXXXI  men.  The  inscription  below  is  manifestly  either  the  name 
of  the  person  or  the  nation  that  accomplished  this  enterprise. 

And  here  it  must  be  confessed,  my  observation  did  not  enable 
me  to  find  the  expected  name  of  "Thorfinn."  The  figure  assumed 
to  stand  for  the  letters  Th.  is  some  feet  distant  from  its  point  of 
construed  connection,  and  several  other  pictographic  figures  inter- 
vene. The  figures  succeeding  the  ancient  O  cannot,  by  any  in- 
genuity, be  construed  to  stand  for  an  F,  I,  or  N.  The  terminal 
letter  is  clearly  an  X,  or  the  figure  ten.  With  respect  to  the 
characters  which  should  be  inserted  after  the  letters  OR,  as  they 
appear  in  the  drawings  [of  Baylies  and  Rafn],  we  have  felt  much 
hesitancy.  Nothing  is  more  demonstrable  than  that  whatever  has 
emanated  in  the  graphic  or  inscriptive  art,  on  this  continent,  from 
the  Red  race,  does  not  aspire  above  the  simple  art  of  pictography ; 
and  that  wherever  an  alphabet  of  any  kind  is  veritably  discovered, 
it  must  have  had  a  foreign  origin. 

This  confidence  that  the  central  inscription  was  of  Scan- 
dinavian, though  unreadable,  character,  was  of  brief  duration. 
In  1853,  Captain  Seth  Eastman,  of  the  United  States  Army,  in 
pursuance  of  his  task  of  supplying  illustrations  for  School- 
craft's volumes,  secured  a  daguerreotype  of  the  rock,  prob- 
ably not  the  first  that  was  ever  taken,  but  nevertheless  the 
earliest  photographic  reproduction  of  the  inscription  that  has 
been  preserved.^  The  circumstances  of  its  production  will  be 
described  in  a  later  connection.  After  seeing  it,  Schoolcraft, 
who  reproduced  it  in  the  fourth  volume  of  his  work  on  the 
Indian  Tribes,  came  to  his  final  conclusion  concerning  the  in- 
scription :  "It  is  entirely  Indian,  and  is  executed  in  the  symbolic 
character  which  the  Algonquins  call  Kekeewin,  i.  e.,  teachings. 
The  fancied  resemblances  to  old  forms  of  the  Roman  letters 
or  figures  wholly  disappear."     This  opinion  he  repeated  in 

1  See  our  Figure  16. 


114  DIGHTON  ROCK 

greater  detail  in  1860;  but  his  comments  at  that  time  can  be 
presented  better  after  we  have  examined,  in  abbreviated  form, 
his  account  of  Chingwauk's  interpretation.  Reference  to  the 
numbers  vi^hich  he  attached  to  his  drawings  (Figure  15)  will 
aid  in  identifying  the  portions  of  the  inscription  under  dis- 
cussion. 

I  will  introduce  an  interpretation  which  was  made  by  Ching- 
wauk,  a  well-known  Algonquin  priest  or  Meda,  at  Michillimacki- 
nac,  in  1839.  He  is  well  versed  in  the  Ke-kee-win,  or  pictographic 
method  of  communicating  ideas.  He  is  the  principal  chief  on  the 
British  side  of  the  river  at  Sault  St.  Marie.  He  is  quite  intelligent 
in  the  history  and  traditions  of  the  northern  Indians,  and  par- 
ticularly so  of  his  own  tribe.  Naturally  a  man  of  a  strong  and 
sound,  but  uncultivated  mind,  he  possesses  powers  of  reflection 
beyond  most  of  his  people.  He  has  also  a  good  memory,  and  may 
be  considered  a  learned  man,  in  a  tribe  where  learning  is  the  result 
of  memory,  in  retaining  the  accumulated  stores  of  forest  arts  and 
forest  lore,  as  derived  from  oral  sources.  He  was  one  of  the 
war-chiefs  of  his  tribe,  in  the  perilous  era  of  1812.  He  speaks  his 
own  language  fluently,  and  is  still  regarded  as  one  of  the  best 
orators  of  his  tribe. 

To  him  Schoolcraft  submitted  the  plate  in  Antiquitates 
Americance  containing  the  drawings  of  Baylies  and  of  Rafn. 
Chingwauk  selected  the  former,  and  excluded  from  it  the  cen- 
tral characters,  which  he  did  not  regard  as  belonging  with  the 
rest.  It  will  be  remembered  that  Schoolcraft  himself  at  first 
considered  them  Scandinavian,  but  later  changed  his  opinion. 
After  scrutinizing  the  engraving,  Chingwauk  remarked :  "It  is 
Indian;  it  appears  to  me  and  my  friend  to  be  a  muz-zin-na-hik 
(i,  e.,  rock-writing).  It  relates  to  two  nations."  He  then  took 
the  volume  to  his  lodge  in  order  to  study  it  further,  and  on  the 
following  day  gave  the  following  interpretation: 

All  the  figures  to  the  left  of  the  line  AB  relate  to  the  acts  and 
exploits  of  the  chief  represented  by  the  key  figure,  Number  1,  and 
all  the  devices  to  the  right  of  it  have  reference  to  his  enemies  and 
their  acts.  The  inscription  relates  to  two  nations.  •  Both  were 
Indian  people.  No.  1  represents  an  ancient  prophet  and  war- 
captain.    He  records  his  exploits  and  prophetic  arts.    The  lines  or 


DEVELOPMENT  OF  INDIAN  THEORY        115 

plumes  from  his  head  denote  his  power  and  character.  No.  2  re- 
presents his  sister.  She  has  been  his  assistant  and  confidant  in 
some  of  his  prophetical  arts.  She  is  also  the  Boon  of  Success  in 
the  contemplated  enterprise,  and  she  is  held  out,  as  a  gift,  to  the 
first  man  who  shall  strike,  or  touch  a  dead  body  in  battle.  No.  3 
depicts  the  prophet's  or  seer's  lodge.  It  has  several  divisions, 
appropriated  to  separate  uses.  Part  a  denotes  the  vapor-bath,  or 
secret  sweating  lodge,  marked  by  crossed  war-clubs.  The  three 
dots,  in  the  center  of  the  apartment  b,  denote  three  large  stones 
used  for  heating  water  to  make  steam,  and  are  supposed  to  be 
endowed  with  magical  virtues.  The  sacred  apartment,  c,  frcan 
which  oracular  responses  are  made,  contains  a  consecrated  war- 
club,  d,  of  ancient  make,  and  a  consecrated  pole  or  balista,  e. 

No.  4  represents  a  ponderous  war-club,  consecrated  for  battle. 
No.  5,  the  semicircle  of  six  dots,  signifies  so  many  moons,  marking 
the  time  he  devoted  to  perfect  himself  for  the  exploit,  or  actually 
consumed  in  its  accomplishment.  6  is  the  symbol  of  a  warrior's 
heart ;  7,  a  dart ;  8,  the  figure  of  an  anomalous  animal  which  prob- 
ably appeared  in  his  fasts  to  befriend  him.  9  and  10  are  un- 
explained. 11  represents  the  number  40.  The  dot  above  denotes 
skulls.  12  is  the  symbol  of  the  principal  war-chief  of  the  ex- 
pedition against  the  enemy.  He  led  the  attack.  He  bears  the 
totemic  device  of  the  Pighoo,  or  northern  lynx.  13  is  the  symbol 
of  the  sun.  It  is  repeated  three  times  in  the  inscription ;  once  for 
the  prophet's  lodge,  again  for  his  sister,  and  again  for  the  prophet 
himself,  as  his  totem,  or  the  heraldic  device  of  his  clan.  14  repre- 
sents a  sea  bird  called  MONG,  or  the  loon.  It  is  the  prophet's 
name.  15  is  a  war-camp,  the  place  of  rendezvous,  where  the  war- 
dance  was  celebrated  before  battle,  and  also  the  spot  of  reassembly 
on  their  triumphant  return.  16  is  an  ensign,  or  skin  flag,  and  17 
an  instrument  used  in  war  ceremonies  in  honor  of  a  victory,  as 
in  ceremoniously  raising  the  flag,  and  placing  it  in  rest  after  vic- 
tory, to  be  left  as  a  memento.  18,  19,  and  20  are  dead  bodies, 
the  number  of  men  lost  in  the  attack.  21  is  a  pipe  of  ancient 
construction  ornamented  with  feathers ;  22  a  stone  of  prophecy ; 
23  unexplained ;  24  without  significance ;  and  25  a  wooden  idol, 
set  up  in  the  direction  of  the  enemy's  country,  and  within  sight 
of  the  prophet's  lodge. 

The  devices  to  the  right  of  the  line  AB  have  relation,  exclu- 
sively or  chiefly,  to  warlike  and  prophetical  incidents  on  the  part 
of  the  enemy,  represented  by  26,  27.     They  are  drawn  without 


116  DIGHTON  ROCK 

arms,  to  depict  their  fear  and  cowardice  on  the  onset.  They  were 
paralyzed  by  the  shock,  and  acted  like  men  without  hands.  28,  29 
are  decapitated  men,  probably  chiefs  or  leaders.  30  is  a  belt  of 
peace,  denoting  a  negotiation  or  treaty.  31  is  the  enemy's  prophet's 
lodge ;  32,  a  bow  bent,  and  pointed  against  the  tribe  of  Mong, 
as  a  symbol  of  preparation  for  war  and  of  proud  boasting;  33, 
a  symbol  of  doubt,  or  want  of  confidence  in  the  enemy's  prophet ; 
34,  a  lance  pointing  to  the  enemy,  a  symbol  of  boasting  and 
preparation ;  35,  an  ancient  war-club. 

The  purport  of  the  section  to  the  left  of  the  line  CD  appears 
doubtful.  Most  of  the  marks  appear  without  meaning.  It  appears 
to  be  the  territory  of  the  Mong  tribe.  39,  40  are  villages  and 
paths  of  this  people  or  their  confederates ;  41  is  Mong's  village, 
or  the  chief  location  of  the  Assonets,  being  on  the  banks  of  a  river. 
It  may  also  represent  a  skin  flag  used  in  the  war,  and  the  dance 
of  triumph. 

Schoolcraft  himself  attempts  to  interpret  a  few  of  the  fig- 
ures left  unexplained  by  Chingwauk :  43  denotes  war-like  im- 
plements; 47,  a  banner;  45,  a  headless  enemy,  the  drawing  of 
which  from  the  1837  version,  he  forgot  to  introduce  on  his 
combination  plate.  The  number  23  he  attached  to  one  figure 
on  this  plate,  but  to  another  on  his  "synopsis,"  where  it  applies 
to  the  character  M  just  to  the  right  of  the  CXXXI,  44.  The 
M-like  part  of  this,  and  of  figure  42,  he  wrongly  says  has  been 
interpreted  by  Mr.  Magnusen  as  an  ancient  anaglyph,  standing 
for  the  word  men.  In  reality,  Magnusen  considered  it  a  mono- 
gram for  NAM,  while  the  runic  letter  that  he  interpreted  as 
men  was  the  right  half  of  Schoolcraft's  21.  We  have  already 
made  acquaintance  with  the  latter's  Scandinavian  interpreta- 
tions of  a  few  remaining  characters. 

In  1860,  Schoolcraft  connected  this  interpretation  by  Ching- 
wauk, made  by  him  "with  priestly  skill  in  necromancy,"  with 
the  battles  and  triumphs  of  the  local  Wampanoag  Indians.  He 
says  there,  in  part : 

The  Pokanokets  were  descended  from  an  ancient  stock,  and,  it 
is  believed,  they  established  themselves  on  the  peninsula,  with  the 
aid  of  their  friends  and  allies,  the  Narragansetts  and  Pequots,  after 
conquering  the  tribes  which  then  held  possession.     Evidences  of 


DEVELOPMENT  OF  INDIAN  THEORY        117 

their  ancient  triumphs  have,  it  is  believed,  been  found  in  the  rude 
and  simple  pictographs  of  the  country.  These  simple  historical 
memorials  were  more  common  among  the  hills  and  valleys  of  the 
country,  when  it  was  first  occupied,  than  they  are  at  the  present 
day.  On  the  Dighton  rock,  the  amazement  of  the  vanquished  at 
the  sudden  assault  of  the  victors,  is  symbolically  depicted  by  their 
being  deprived  of  both  hands  and  arms,  or  the  power  of  making 
any  resistance.  The  name  of  the  reigning  chief  of  the  tribe,  is 
likewise  described  by  a  symbol  to  have  been  Mong,  or  the  Loon, 
and  his  totem,  the  Sun.  The  name  of  Wampanoag,  by  which  the 
Pokanokets  were  also  designated,  appears  to  denote  the  fact,  that 
they  were,  from  early  times,  the  custodians  of  the  imperial  shell, 
or  medal. 

It  is  hardly  to  be  wondered  at,  after  this,  that  Mallery, 
though  speaking  in  the  main  appreciatively  of  Schoolcraft,  re- 
marked that  he  was  "tinctured  with  a  fondness  for  the  mys- 
terious," and  that  interpretation  by  Indians  must  be  received 
with  caution;  or  that  Cyrus  Thomas  says  that  "this  Indian's 
explanation  is  considered  doubtful."  He  might  well  have 
spoken  more  strongly.  "Beyond  the  fact  that  by  habits  of 
thought  and  training  the  Indian  may  be  presumed  to  be  in 
closer  touch  with  the  glyph  maker  than  the  more  civilized 
investigator,"  says  Henshaw,  "the  Indian  is  no  better  qualified 
to  interpret  petroglyphs  than  the  latter,  and  in  many  respects, 
indeed,  is  far  less  qualified,  even  though  the  rock  pictures  may 
have  been  made  by  his  forbears."  We  have  found  abundant 
reason  to  feel  sure  that  any  one  may  with  equal  justification 
interpret  any  of  the  pictographic  figures  on  the  rock  in  what- 
ever manner  pleases  his  own  prejudice  and  fancy;  there  is  no 
reason,  therefore,  to  allow  more  weight  to  the  priestly  fancies 
and  habits  of  thought  of  Chingwauk  than  to  those  of  the 
Mohawk  chiefs,  or  of  a  Gebelin,  a  Hill,  or  a  Magnusen.  All  of 
them  are  picturesque  and  of  historical  value,  all  of  them  illus- 
trate instructive  phases  of  psychology,  but  all  of  them  are  snares 
and  delusions  if  taken  as  possible  truths. 

That  the  practice  of  picture-writing  was  of  extremely  wide 
extent  among  the  Indians  is  repeatedly  emphasized  by  School- 
craft.   Thomas  Ewbank  contributed  to  a  spread  of  knowledge 


118  DIGHTON  ROCK 

of  this  fact,  and  strongly  cautioned  "against  an  hypothesis,  not 
more  untenable  than  absurd — that  of  seeking  to  explain  Indian 
characters  by  phonetic  symbols  they  are  fancied  to  resemble. 
.  .  .  Why,  there  is  hardly  a  tribal  mark  painted  on  the  face  of 
a  savage,"  he  exclaims,  "or  tattooed  on  his  person,  but  the  germ 
of  some  European  or  Oriental  letter  might  be  imagined  in  it. 
As  well  derive  Indian  totems  from  books  of  natural  history, 
and  insist  that  mocassins  were  imitations  of  our  shoes  and  leg- 
gings of  our  stockings."  Daniel  G.  Brinton  also  insisted  that 
Dighton  Rock  presented  only  a  specimen  of  a  kind  of  writing 
that  was  common  throughout  the  continent.  "They  are  the 
rude  and  meaningless  epitaphs  of  vanished  generations."  And 
again : 

Some  antiquarians  regard  all  these  pictographs  as  merely  the 
amusement  of  idle  hours,  the  meaningless  products  of  the  fancy 
of  illiterate  savages.  But  the  great  labor  expended  upon  them 
and  the  care  with  which  many  of  them  are  executed  testify  to  a 
higher  origin.  They  are  undoubtedly  the  records  of  transactions 
deemed  important,  and  were  intended  to  perpetuate  by  enduring 
signs  the  memory  of  events  or  beliefs.  .  .  .  Archaeologists  are  of 
the  opinion  that  their  differences  [in  different  areas]  are  related 
to  the  various  methods  of  sign-language  or  gesture-speech  which 
prevailed  among  the  early  tribes. 

George  A.  Shove,  who  was  a  life-long  resident  near  the 
rock,  and  an  artist  who  often  made  paintings  picturing  its  sur- 
face and  surroundings,  wrote  well  of  it  in  1883,  and  attributed 
it  to  the  Indians.  We  need  to  quote  only  a  few  of  his  words, 
since  they  give  us  no  new  facts,  but  merely  testify  to  the  growth 
of  this  opinion  in  a  neighborhood  where  proof  of  a  foreign 
and  ancient  origin  would  naturally  have  been  more  welcome 
because  of  its  seemingly  greater  importance : 

In  considering  the  diverse  theories  that  have  been  advanced  as 
to  the  genesis  of  the  sculptured  characters  on  this  famous  rock  and 
the  difficulty,  if  not  the  impossibility,  of  proving  or  disproving 
either  of  them,  it  would  seem  as  if  the  genius  of  mystery  were 
brooding  over  the  spot,  hiding  with  an  impenetrable  curtain  the 
meaning  of  the  semi-obliterated  characters,  and  one  recalls  the 
inscription  before  the  mysterious  temple  of  Isis,  "yesterday,  today. 


DEVELOPMENT  OF  INDIAN  THEORY        119 

forever,  and  no  mortal  hath  hfted  my  veil."  .  .  .  Those  who  think 
the  inscription  merely  an  example  of  the  rude  pictographs  of  the 
Indians  now  meet  with  little  opposition  to  their  views. 

The  adoption  by  R.  Andree,  a  German  writer  of  influence, 
of  the  "most  natural  and  simple  view,  that  we  have  here  only  a 
very  ordinary  Indian  petroglyph,"  was  a  further  step  in  the 
advance  of  this  opinion.  As  to  the  figures  resembling  runes, — ■ 
it  would  have  been  far  simpler  to  regard  the  resemblance  as  due 
merely  to  accident ;  such  "runes"  can  be  seen  on  a  great  number 
of  rock-markings  all  over  the  world. 

The  conclusion  thus  definitely  established  by  this  time  was 
well  expressed  by  J.  W.  Powell  in  1890,  though  without  refer- 
ence by  him  to  its  application  to  Dighton  Rock:  "One  of  the 
safest  conclusions  reached  in  the  study  of  North  American 
Archaeology,  is  that  graphic  art  on  bark,  bone,  shell  or  stone 
never  reached  a  higher  stage  than  simple  picture-making,  in 
which  no  attempt  was  made  to  delineate  form  in  three  dimen- 
sions, and  in  which  hieroglyphics  never  appear.""  Shortly  after 
this  the  memorable  study  by  Mallery  of  the  pictographs  of  the 
American  Indians  appeared  in  its  final  form.  In  his  pre- 
liminary paper  he  had  already  said  of  Dighton  Rock:  "It  is 
merely  a  type  of  Algonkin  rock-carving,  not  so  interesting  as 
many  others."  In  the  later  discussion  he  notes  its  resemblance 
in  character  to  many  other  Indian  glyphs  in  various  parts  of  the 
country — a  resemblance  which  cannot  fail  to  impress  any  one 
who  impartially  compares  it  with  the  many  examples  pictured 
in  the  book. 

If  we  accept  the  essential  identity  in  character  and  origin  of 
our  Assonet  inscription  and  those  on  numerous  other  rocks, 
then  the  remarks  of  W.  J.  Holland  on  certain  petroglyphs  in 
Pennsylvania  are  pertinent,  and  emphasize  an  estimate  of  their 
significance  different  from  that  of  most  of  the  authorities  thus 
far  quoted.  These  are  on  the  Ohio  river,  and  are  submerged 
except  at  low  water.  "I  wish  to  say  that  I  have  no  idea  that 
they  embody  historic  records.  I  picture  to  myself  a  tribe  of 
lazy  Indians  camping  on  the  edge  of  the  river,  engaged  in  fish- 

2  "Prehistoric  Mao  in  America,"  in  Forum,  1890,  viii.  502. 


120  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ing  and  hunting,  and  amusing  themselves  in  their  rough  way 
by  depicting  things  on  the  smooth  surface  of  the  stone  with  a 
harder  stone.  They  speak  of  an  idle  hour  and  the  outgoing 
of  the  pictorial  instinct  which  exists  in  all  men.  I  cannot  see 
anything  more  important  than  that." 

Among  the  latest  expressions  of  opinion  by  students  of  the 
Indians,  now  shared  by  all  authorities  of  this  class,  is  the  fol- 
lowing by  William  H.  Holmes :  "The  concensus  of  opinion 
among  students  of  aboriginal  art  today  is  that  the  inscription 
is  purely  Indian,  not  differing  in  any  essential  respect  from 
thousands  of  petroglyphic  records  (undecipherable  save  in  so 
far  as  the  pictures  tell  the  story)  scattered  over  the  continent 
from  the  Atlantic  to  the  Pacific."  Still  more  recently,  the 
same  writer  remarks :  "Visions  of  mysterious  races  and  lost 
civilizations  haunt  the  minds  of  those  only  who  have  failed  to 
keep  in  touch  with  the  progress  of  archaeological  research 
throughout  America."  Similarly  Cyrus  Thomas  said  in  1907: 
"The  general  conclusion  of  students  in  later  years,  especially 
after  Mallery's  discussion,  is  that  the  inscription  is  the  work  of 
Indians  and  belongs  to  a  type  found  in  Pennsylvania  and  at 
points  in  the  west." 

The  great  and  indisputable  result  of  research  along  these 
lines,  the  only  ones  which  have  yielded  definite  and  lasting 
results  in  contributing  to  the  interpretation  of  Dighton  Rock, 
has  been  to  establish  clearly  the  Indian  origin  of  most  if  not 
all  of  the  lines  and  characters  marked  upon  it.  No  other  rock, 
of  course,  exactly  duplicates  its  design.  But  those  now  known, 
of  unquestionably  Indian  workmanship,  that  are  like  it  in 
character  are  exceedingly  numerous.  In  some  cases,  even 
resemblance  to  particular  figures  has  been  noted.  Thus,  Catlin 
gives  plates  showing  pictures  of  an  animal  very  like  that  prom- 
inent on  Dighton  Rock.  Similar  human  figures  are  found  on 
plates  in  Schoolcraft,  Squier,  and  Mallery.  Characters  re- 
sembling the  square  O,  the  M,  X,  I,  and  R  may  be  found  in 
the  same  sources.  Without  such  approaches  to  exact  duplica- 
tion, however,  a  general  resemblance  is  repeatedly  evident,  and 
these  authorities  point  out  such  resemblances  in  connection 
with  an  impressive  array  of  localities :  New  Mexico,  the  Mis- 


DEVELOPMENT  OF  INDIAN  THEORY        121 

sissippi  valley,  on  the  rivers  Allegheny,  Monongahela,  Kana- 
wha, Ohio,  Guyandotte,  Muskingum,  Cumberland,  Tennessee, 
Missouri,  Susquehanna,  on  Lake  Erie.  Particularly  close 
resemblance  is  evident  in  the  case  of  the  rocks  at  Smith's  Ferry, 
Pennsylvania,  pictured  by  Holland,  and  is  claimed  by  Mallery 
for  others  in  the  same  State,  one  near  Millsboro,  the  Indian 
God  rock  near  Franklin,  the  Big  Indian  rock  and  one  at  Mc- 
Call's  Ferry  on  the  Susquehanna.  Mallery  notes  that  they  are 
often  found  at  waterfalls  and  other  points  on  rivers  and  lakes 
favorable  for  fishing. 

The  numerous  objections  urged  from  time  to  time  against 
the  possibility  that  the  aborigines  of  the  region  may  have  carved 
the  rock  have  now  been  completely  disposed  of.  To  the  early 
view  that  no  similar  Indian  monuments  exist,  that  the  occupa- 
tion and  the  designs  were  incompatible  with  their  customs  or 
their  powers,  we  have  received  a  complete  and  convincing 
answer.  To  the  plea  that  the  Indians  were  ignorant  of  the 
existence  or  origin  of  this  and  other  inscriptions,  and  hence 
could  not  possibly  be  its  authors,  we  may  oppose  the  fact  that 
the  apparent  ignorance  might  be  due  equally  well  to  either  of 
two  causes  frequently  operative  among  them :  unwillingness  to 
reveal  all  that  they  know,  or  lack  of  the  habit  of  transmitting 
from  generation  to  generation  knowledge  of  ancestral  deeds, 
especially  those  of  a  trivial  character.  Henshaw  says  that 
"modern  Indians  often  disclaim  knowledge  of  or  interest  in  the 
origin  and  significance  of  petroglyphs ;"  and  Tylor  tells  us  that 
"there  is  seldom  a  key  to  be  had  to  the  reading  of  rock- 
sculptures,  which  the  natives  generally  say  were  done  by  the 
people  long  ago."  In  a  case  on  the  island  of  St.  Vincent,  Brin- 
ton  found  that  "the  present  Indians  know  nothing  of  the  origin, 
age  or  meaning  of  these  monuments."  Their  actual  or  appar- 
ent ignorance  argues  nothing  against  the  possibility  that  the 
work  was  done  by  their  ancestors,  even  in  the  not  very  remote 
past.  If  it  be  urged  that  the  Indians  were  too  idle  and  lazy  for 
such  work,  Squier  and  Mallery  tell  us  what  patient  and  labori- 
ous tasks  they  executed,  and  Holland  and  others  express  the 
belief  that  it  was  by  very  reason  of  their  idleness  that  the 
picture-making  amusement  was  engaged  in.    When  the  attempt 


122  DIGHTON  ROCK 

is  made,  as  it  often  is,  to  clinch  the  unfavorable  argument  by 
claiming  that  they  had  no  adequate  tools,  we  learn  on  the 
authority  of  those  who  have  personally  tested  it  that  the 
ordinary  stone  implements  of  the  Indians  sufficed;  and  more- 
over, if  metal  instruments  had  to  be  conceded,  there  is  no  evi- 
dence that  the  work  was  done  until  after  metal  tools  had  been 
supplied  to  the  native  tribes. 

The  realization  that  without  any  doubt  most  of  the  char- 
acters, at  least,  are  Indian  markings  and  pictographs,  does  not 
help  materially  toward  discovering  what  information,  if  any, 
they  were  intended  to  record.     Many  opinions  have  been  ad- 
vanced, not  as  to  their  exact  translation,  but  as  to  their  general 
significance.    We  have  seen  some  of  our  authorities,  early  and 
recent,  believing  that  they  are  meaningless  scrawls  and  pictures, 
executed  purely  for  amusement,  or  even  accidental  marks  made 
in  the  process  of  sharpening  arrow-heads.     The  latter  view  is 
absurd,  but  the  former  must  be  considered  as  a  possibility. 
Inasmuch  as  this  question  will  assume  serious  importance  in  our 
own  conclusions,  it  will  be  well  to  realize  that  the  weight  of 
present  most  authoritative  opinion  favors  the  belief  that  they 
were  meant  to  record  definite  and  important  facts  or  events. 
Brinton's  statement  has  already  been  noticed.     Mallery  says:^ 
"No  doubt  should  exist  that  the  picture-writings  of  the  North  V 
American  Indians  were  not  made  for  mere  pastime  but  have 
purpose  and  meaning.    Their  relegation  to  a  trivial  origin  will 
be  abandoned  after  a  thorough  knowledge  of  the  labor  and 
thought  which  frequently  were  necessary  for  their  production. 
The  old  devices  are  substantially  the  same  as  the  modern ;  and 
when  Indians  now  make  pictographs,  it  is  with  intention  and 
care,  seldom  for  mere  amusement.    They  are  not  idle  scrawls." 
Henshaw  supports  the  same  view :  "Significance  is  an  essential 
element  of  pictographs,  which  are  alike  in  that  they  all  express 
thought,  register  a  fact,  or  convey  a  message.  .  .  .  That,  as  a 
rule,  petroglyphs  are  not  mere  idle  scrawls  made  to  gratify  a 
fleeting  whim,  or  pass  an  idle  moment,  is  probably  true,  although 
sometimes  they  are  made  by  children  in  play  or  as  a  pastime." 
Nevertheless,  even  so,  there  is  no  expectation  that  their 
translation  would  yield  material  of  any  historical  importance. 


DEVELOPMENT  OF  INDIAN  THEORY        123 

Squier  has  been  quoted  as  believing  this.  Mallery  is  of  the 
same  opinion :  "Their  employment  to  designate  tribes,  groups 
within  tribes,  and  individual  persons  has  been  the  most  fre- 
quent use  to  which  they  have  been  applied.  Some  of  the  char- 
acters were  mere  records  of  the  visits  of  individuals."  Hen- 
shaw,  likewise,  agrees  that  "our  present  knowledge  of  Indian 
petroglyphs  does  not  justify  the  belief  that  they  record  events 
of  great  importance.  Their  significance  is  more  often  local  than 
general ;  they  pertain  to  the  individual  rather  than  to  the  nation, 
and  they  record  personal  achievements  and  happenings  more 
frequently  than  tribal  histories;  petroglyphs,  too,  are  known 
often  to  be  the  records  of  the  visits  of  individuals  to  certain 
places,  sign-posts  to  indicate  the  presence  of  water  or  the  direc- 
tion of  a  trail,  to  give  warning  or  to  convey  a  message.  How- 
ever important  such  records  may  have  seemed  at  the  time, 
viewed  historically  they  are  of  trivial  import  and,  for  the 
greater  part,  their  interest  perished  with  their  originators." 

If  our  own  particular  rock  possesses  any  meaning  at  all, 
then  we  have  suggestions  that  the  event  recorded  may  have 
been  some  important  transaction,  treaty,  battle,  or  solemn 
occasion;  or  that  the  record  is  a  depiction  of  hunting  scenes. 
Some  of  the  characters  may  be  mnemonic  reminders  of  events 
or  of  songs  or  formulae  known  by  heart,  or  symbols  of  myth 
and  religion.  Some  may  be  totem-marks  of  tribe  or  individual, 
closely  connected  with  similar  designs  painted  on  the  face  or 
body.  Catlin  emphasized  this,  and  Mallery  holds  that  "the 
ideography  and  symbolism  displayed  in  these  devices  present 
suggestive  studies  in  psychology  more  interesting  than  the  mere 
information  or  text  contained  in  the  pictures."  Some  charac- 
ters may  be  English  letters,  initials  of  the  names  of  Indians  who 
had  become  familiar  with  the  act  of  thus  affixing  signatures  or 
marks  to  deeds.  Some  may  be  tally-marks,  and  some  may  even 
represent  a  map  of  some  locality.  Many  writers  believe  that 
petroglyphic  designs  in  general  have  an  intimate  connection 
with  sign-language,  which  has  prevailed  here  "to  an  extent 
unknown  in  other  parts  of  the  world,"  according  to  Mallery 
and  others.  In  any  case,  whatever  their  original  significance, 
they  are  unreadable.    Thus  Holmes  says  that  "they  cannot  be 


124  DIGHTON  ROCK 

interpreted,  save  in  rare  cases  where  tradition  has  kept  the 
significance  alive:"  and  Henshaw  agrees,  in  these  words: 
"Whatever  the  subjects  recorded  by  Indian  glyphs,  whether 
more  or  less  important,  the  picture  signs  and  their  symbolism 
were  rarely  part  of  a  general  system,  unless  perhaps  among 
the  Aztec  and  the  Maya,  but  are  of  individual  origin,  are  ob- 
scured by  conventionalism,  and  require  for  their  interpretation 
a  knowledge  of  their  makers  and  of  the  customs  and  events  of 
the  times,  which  usually  are  wanting.  In  most  cases  only  the 
writer  and  his  intimate  compeers  possessed  the  key." 

These  are  the  most  important  suggestions  that  have  been 
offered.  Which  ones  among  them  may  be  accepted  as  really 
applying  to  our  rock  is  a  matter  that  must  be  reserved  for  later 
decision.  It  is  evident,  however,  that  in  case  any  of  these 
explanations  are  true,  it  would  never  be  possible  to  genuinely 
translate  the  corresponding  characters.  Only  if  it  were  known 
from  other  sources  that  a  particular  formula  was  there 
mnemonically  indicated,  or  a  myth  symbolized,  or  a  particular 
event  illustrated,  or  a  particular  individual's  initial  or  totem  or 
face-device  inscribed,  could  we  be  sure  that  that  was  among  the 
features  of  the  record.  Such  procedure  is  manifestly  not 
translation,  but  recognition  of  something  already  known  as  at 
least  probably  there.  Whatever  may  be  possible  in  the  future, 
thus  far  not  even  a  single  item  of  such  recognition  of  a  mean- 
ing has  been  established  for  any  of  the  Indian  devices  upon 
this  rock.  The  differing  hypotheses  as  to  the  general  nature 
of  the  characters  need  not  be  taken  as  mutually  exclusive  rivals. 
It  is  probable  that  instead  of  one  connected  record,  the  rock- 
surface  preserves  marks  made  on  many  different  occasions  and 
for  different  purposes. 

Although  it  is  certain  that  most  of  the  carvings  were  made 
by  Indians,  and  that  even  the  established  presence  of  detached 
letters  of  the  English  alphabet  would  not  necessarily  indicate 
anything  other  than  initials  of  Indians  of  colonial  times,  yet 
this  does  not  exclude  the  possibility  that  there  may  be  other 
records  intermingled  with  the  Indian  ones.  The  many  transla- 
tions that  we  are  assembling  for  their  historical  and  psycho- 
logical interest  are  all  of  them,  we  may  be  sure,  mere  pleasing 


DEVELOPMENT  OF  INDIAN  THEORY        125 

flights  of  imagination,  grown-up's  fairy  tales,  without  founda- 
tion in  reality.  Yet  the  characters  engraved  there  have  always 
been  so  faint  and  obscure,  even  in  the  earliest  days  in  which 
white  men  began  to  observe  them,  that  no  one  can  be  sure  of 
more  than  a  small  portion  of  the  original  lines.  It  is  not  im- 
possible that,  through  improvements  in  photography  or  in  other 
ways,  hitherto  hidden  tracings,  if  there  be  any,  may  become 
known.  When  our  historical  survey  is  completed  and  we  arrive 
at  an  attempt  to  draw  conclusions  of  our  own,  we  shall  find 
it  necessary  to  give  serious  consideration  to  some  wholly  new 
suggestions  along  these  lines. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

A    MEDLEY    OF    RECENT    OPINIONS 

Next  after  the  Norse  and  the  Indian  theories,  that  of  an- 
cient Phcenician  origin  has  possessed  an  appeal  that  has  gained 
for  it  the  largest  number  of  adherents.  Its  charm  for  the  mys- 
tery-lovers has  not  yet  ceased.  Along  with  it,  several  other 
ancient  theories  have  continued  to  attract  supporters  and  been 
given  greater  detail,  and  a  number  of  entirely  new  ones  have 
been  added  to  the  long  list.  A  consideration  of  these  will 
complete  our  historical  survey. 

1.  A  Libyan  Theory. — One  of  the  new  theories  was  ad- 
vanced soon  after  the  publication  of  the  Antiquitates  Ameri- 
cancB,  by  Edme  Frangois  Jomard,  "president  de  I'academie  des 
inscriptions  et  belles-lettres  de  I'lnstitut."  He  had  been  engaged 
for  a  long  time,  he  said,  in  seeking  traces  of  a  dialect  which  he 
called  the  ancient  Libyan,  represented  by  the  modern  Berber, 
once  universally  spoken  along  the  80-day  caravan  route  from 
Egypt  to  the  Gates  of  Hercules.  This  was  the  common  lan- 
guage of  the  caravans  which,  from  before  the  time  of  Herod- 
otus, engaged  in  the  commerce  of  salt  along  the  entire  northern 
coast  of  Africa. 

When  I  began  to  study  the  monument  of  Taunton,  my  surprise 
was  great  to  recognize  the  analogy  of  its  forms  with  the  inscrip- 
tions of  Fezzan  and  of  the  Atlas.  I  have  never  admitted  the  pre- 
tended derivation  of  American,  Mexican  or  Peruvian  monuments 
from  India  or  from  Egypt.  What  appears  to  me  most  probable 
is  that  the  Africans  of  the  Canaries,  or  even  the  Carthaginians, 
have  been  in  contact  with  the  Americans.  Not  only  would  the 
trade  winds  have  carried  them  a  thousand  times  to  America,  but 
they  would  also  have  been  likely  to  have  sought  in  this  direction 
for  riches  such  as  the  commerce  of  India  and  of  China  procured 
for  the  Asiatics.    The  inscription  on  the  Taunton  rock,  although 

126 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS  127 

of  a  barbaric  design,  presents  forms  which  are  unmistakably  like 
the  Libyan  characters.  .  .  .  The  monument  is  evidently  ancient. 

2.  Revivals  of  the  Phoenician  Theory. — An  article  ap- 
peared in  the  Taunton  Whig  in  1839,  strongly  supporting  the 
responsibility  of  the  Phoenicians.  The  editor  of  the  paper  re- 
marked that  it  consisted  of  "extracts  from  a  letter  written  by 
a  gentleman  in  our  vicinity."  If  this  gentleman  was  not  actually 
Joseph  W.  Moulton  at  least  he  used  almost  the  exact  arguments 
of  the  latter.  Besides  presenting  the  reasons  for  his  own  belief, 
he  is  authority  for  the  fact  of  the  visit  to  the  rock  in  "1798" 
of  "M.  Adel,"  which  we  have  interpreted  as  meaning  probably 
1796  and  M.  Adet;  and  he  claims  to  have  seen  the  celelyated 
and  elusive  "bird" — which  Moulton  had  not  seen  in  182^1 — 
and  also  on  the  south  end  of  the  rock  a  number  of  marks,  ob- 
served by  none  before,  including  three  triangles  resembling  the 
Greek  Delta,  and  "the  rude  outlines  of  the  head  and  body  of  a 
man.^  To  find  these  figures  much  depends  on  the  position  of 
the  sun;  I  think  the  afternoon  is  the  most  favorable  time  for 
an  examination." 

An  anonymous  writer  in  the  Dublin  Review  of  1841  was 
attracted  by  the  same  possibilities : 

This  mass  of  traditions  convinces  us  that  the  Phoenicians, 
Egyptians,  and  Greeks,  were  acquainted  from  the  remotest  times 
with  Atlantic  islands,  peopled  by  Atlantians  or  Cimbrians,  and  that 
these  islands  comprehended  the  Americas.  ...  It  would  be  too 
bold  to  draw  an  inference  from  the  monument,  apparently  Punic, 
which  was  found  some  years  ago  in  the  forests  behind  Boston.  It 
is  possible  that  some  Tyrians  or  Carthaginians,  thrown  by  storms 
on  these  unknown  coasts,  uncertain  if  ever  the  same  tracts  might 
be  again  discovered,  chose  to  leave  this  monument  of  their  adven- 
tures. Of  their  further  expeditions  there  is  no  trace.  Nor  do  we 
know  whether  these  adventurers  returned,  or  what  attraction  the 
marshy  feet  of  the  American  mountains  held  out  to  the  avarice 
of  the  Phoenicians. 

Lossing  expounded  a  sort  of  combination  view  about  1850 : 

1 1  doubt  very  much  whether  any  marks  exist  on  the  south,  or  down- 
stream end  of  the  rock.  There  are  some,  however,  on  the  up-stream  end, 
already  described,  ordinarily  wholly  invisible,  but  on  rare  occasions  in  un- 
usually favorable  light  appearing  with  great  clearness. 


128  DIGHTON  ROCK 

When  we  remember  that  the  Phoenicians  were  for  many  ages 
in  the  undisputed  possession  of  the  traffic  of  the  Baltic,  around 
which  clustered  the  Scandinavian  nations,  and  that  Runic,  or  an- 
cient German  inscriptions,  in  Phoenician  characters,  have  been  dis- 
covered in  abundance  in  all  the  countries  formerly  occupied  by 
these  nations,  the  inference  is  plainly  correct,  that  the  Scandi- 
navians received  their  alphabet  from  the  Phoenicians.  ...  Is  it 
not  reasonable  to  infer  that  these  Scandinavians,  acquainted  with 
the  Phoenician  alphabet,  made  a  record  of  the  battle  upon  the 
rock  [at  Dighton],  by  a  mingling  of  alphabetical  characters  and 
pictorial  hieroglyphics  ? 

William  Pidgeon  believed  that  the  rock  at  Dighton  offered 
strong  evidence  of  the  presence  of  Phcenicians  or  their  descend- 
ants on  this  continent.  He  also  had  faith  in  the  presence  in 
this  country  of  authentic  relics  of  Romans,  Greeks,  Persians, 
Egyptians,  Danes  and  Hindoos.  He  is  perhaps  a  rather  late 
survival  of  a  type  of  person  so  delightfully  described  by  a 
reviewer  of  about  the  same  time  that  it  may  relieve  the  mo- 
notony of  our  pages  somewhat  to  quote  him : 

The  learned  have  occupied  themselves  in  tracing  the  physical 
migrations  of  particular  races  of  men ;  .  .  .  how  our  Punic 
friends,  the  Irish,  quitting  Asia,  strayed  to  the  green  isle  and 
thence,  finally,  shilelah  in  hand,  to  "the  land  of  the  free  and  the 
home  of  the  brave ;"  how  our  uncles  the  Welsh  peopled  the  upper 
Missouri  and  turned  into  Kickapoo  Indians ;  in  what  manner  our 
cousins  the  Norwegians  settled  New  England  and  were  the  original 
Yankees ;  and  how  the  pyramid-builders  of  Mexico  and  Yucatan, 
the  Aztecs,  were  nothing  in  the  world  but  the  lineal  progeny  of 
the  Lost  Tribes  of  Israel,  who,  to  our  thinking,  were  no  great  loss 
anyhow,  judged  either  by  their  previous  behavior  or  by  their 
manners  when  found  again. - 

The  next  advocate  in  order  of  time,  Onffroy  de  Thoron, 
presented  such  an  elaborate  and  sparkling  gem  that  we  shall 
reserve  consideration  of  him  to  the  last  among  this  group.  A 
paper  written  in  1890  by  George  M.  Young  of  Boston  shows 
that  this  gentleman,  who  claimed  to  be  "compiling  all  material 
obtainable"  but  who  derived  his  information  apparently  solely 

2  "Notes  on  New  Books,"  in  National  Intelligencer,  September  13,  1848. 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS  129 

from  Barber,  possibly  Schoolcraft,  and  Arnzen,  inclined  to  the 
Phoenician  theory.  Rufus  K.  Sewall,  vice-president  of  the 
Maine  Historical  Society,  held  that  "Deighton  Rock  and  Mon- 
hegan  .  .  .  are  possible  footprints  not  of  Northern  visits  alone 
but  of  Phoenician  adventure  here."  P.  De  Roo,  in  1900, 
argued  in  favor  of  Phoenician  and  other  pre-Columbian  voy- 
ages to  America,  but  held  that  Dighton  Rock  and  other  pre- 
tendedly  Phoenician  monuments  "are  all  equally  dubious." 
Nevertheless,  Mathieu's  theory  appealed  to  him,  and  so  did  that 
of  Norse  origin,  with  the  result  that  he  concluded  that  "it 
would  not  be  an  unnatural  deduction  to  presume  that  the 
famous  Writing  Rock  may  have  been  selected  as  the  faithful 
guardian  of  great  memories  by  both  barbarian  [Indian]  and 
civilized  nations."  Herbert  M.  Sylvester  seems  to  concede  the 
possibility  of  a  Phoenician  origin  when,  after  describing  this 
and  the  Norse  theory  and  denying  that  it  could  have  been  due 
to  the  Indians,  he  remarks:  "Its  antiquity  is  more  remote,  pos- 
sibly, than  as  yet  has  been  accorded  it."  Finally,  in  a  Fall  River 
newspaper  of  1915,  there  is  given  in  its  entirety  the  old  exposi- 
tion by  Gebelin  with  a  remark  by  the  editor  that  the  extract 
describes  "a  probable  visit  by  the  Phoenicians"  to  Dighton, 
that  many  nowadays  believe  the  inscription  to  be  the  work  of 
Indians,  and  that  the  reader  is  left  to  choose  his  own  belief. 

As  a  fitting  conclusion  to  our  survey  of  these  believers  in  the 
American  commerce  of  the  Phoenicians,  we  will  now  return  to 
Onffroy  de  Thoron,  Ancien  Emir  du  Libau  ( 1840).  His  book, 
mentioned  apparently  by  only  one  writer  on  our  subject  and 
thus  discovered  only  by  rare  good  fortune,  is  of  the  extravagant 
type  which  is  so  refreshing  when  it  is  taken,  not  with  the 
seriousness  intended  by  the  author,  but  in  the  spirit  in  which 
we  read  Gulliver's  Travels.  At  the  outset  he  tells  us  that  he 
has  discovered  the  fact  of  the  triennial  voyages  of  the  fleets  of 
Solomon  and  of  Hiram  to  the  river  Amazon,  where  were  the 
regions  of  Ophir,  Tarschich  and  Parvaim,  and  whence  the 
Phoenicians  derived  great  wealth;  and  further,  the  primitive 
language,  still  living  and  spoken  within  the  limits  of  the  terres- 
trial Paradise — the  Kichua  language  of  Peru.  Now  he  an- 
nounces his  third  great  discovery,  to  the  effect  that  the  Phoeni- 


130  DIGHTON  ROCK 

cians  made  voyages  to  Haiti  and  also,  taking  a  northerly  route 
past  Iceland  and  Greenland,  marched  southward  by  land,  fol- 
lowed by  other  fragments  of  maritime  and  commercial  people; 
and,  as  the  centuries  went  by,  their  families  were  mingled  with 
the  autochthonous  populations,  which  absorbed  them,  though 
their  language  still  survives  in  Mexico  under  the  name  of 
Tsendal,  and  likewise  their  story  of  Votan,  mysterious  founder 
of  the  colonies  and  of  the  cult  of  the  Serpent.  Dighton  Rock 
supplies  a  proof  of  these  migrations. 

He  follows  the  Rafn  version  of  the  inscription,  reproduced 
from  Gravier,  Its  characters  are  not  Norse,  but  Phoenician  and 
Campanian.  He  displays  apparently  deep  philological  learning 
in  tracing  the  local  usage  of  each  letter  and  the  derivation  and 
significance  of  each  word  that  he  recognizes.  Into  these  rami- 
fications we  shall  not  follow  him.  Beginning  with  the  marks 
on  the  breast  of  the  bust  at  the  left, — from  which  Gravier  had 
omitted  the  horizontal  line,  thus  leaving  three  separate  char- 
acters— he  identifies  them,  reading  right  to  left,  as  the  Phoeni- 
cian letters  m,  I,  n:  mdlon,  equivalent  to  the  sepulchral  phrase 
"here  lies."  This  n  and  this  m,  he  says,  are  the  characters 
which  Magnusen  accepted  as  meaning  Northmen — a  new  error 
in  placing  the  actual  characters  thus  read  by  the  much  misunder- 
stood runologist.  The  allegorical  image  at  the  right  of  the  bust 
— the  little  Snorre  of  the  Rafnites — represents  a  buried  person, 
upon  whom  and  by  whose  side  tears  are  seen. 

To  follow  the  rest  of  his  translation  by  aid  of  the  drawing,' 
we  must  begin  with  the  familiar  CXXXIM  line  and  continue  it, 
trending  upward,  to  the  O  equipped  with  a  descending  tail ;  and 
below,  beginning  with  the  hour-glass  arrangement  of  the  shoul- 
der of  the  bust,  proceed  through  the  intervening  characters  to 
the  end  of  Rafn's  ORFINS.  Reading  from  right  to  left,  the 
tailed  O  is  a  ^,  the  long  curve  an  n,  the  square  an  o,  and  the 
triangle  an  a :  qanoa.  The  inverted  Y  is  g,  the  A,  d :  gad.  The 
rest  of  the  fj[,  an  inverted  V,  is  g,  and  the  I  is  /:  gal.  Two  X's 
form  the  word  theth.  The  next  X  is  again  th,  the  gamma  is 
p:  thop.  Passing  to  the  rightward  end  of  the  line  below,  the 
S  part  of  the  terminal  X  is  sh,  the  stroke  that  crosses  it  is  I, 

3  Rafn's  drawing,  Figure  6,  No.  IX. 


t^ 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS  131 

and  the  rightward  half  of  the  N  is  again  / :  shdlal.  The  other 
half  of  the  N  is  /,  the  I  is  n,  the  F  is  g,  the  R  is  r:  le-nagar. 
The  diamond-shaped  O  is  o,  the  curving  line  to  the  left  of  it 
is  n,  the  dotted  line  descending  from  the  latter  is  g :  oneg.  Then 
the  dotted  curve  with  its  opening  to  the  right  is  /,  the  diagonal 
stroke  leftward  from  it  is  g,  the  curved  line  attached  to  the  lat- 
ter is  / :  le-gal.  The  upper  part  of  the  last-named  curve  is  I,  the 
O  beyond  it  is  o,  the  hour-glass  is  q,  and  the  stroke  meeting 
its  inner  angle  is  / :  qal-lo.  The  entire  message  is  translated  by 
its  gifted  decipherer  into  both  Latin  and  French:  "Invidiosus 
fortunae,  ruinas  dare  feriendo  spoliabat:  Effusa  est  vita  deli- 
cata  sicut  unda  rapida" — "Envieux  de  la  fortune,  pour  causer 
les  ruines,  il  pillait  en  frappant:  Sa  vie  voluptueuse  s'est 
ecoulee  comme  I'onde  rapide."  Since  this  turns  out  to  be  appar- 
ently the  most  puerile  announcement  that  the  old  rock  ever  has 
been  compelled  to  yield,  the  reader  may  study  both  of  these 
versions  in  order  to  make  out  of  them  as  much  as  he  can. 
Taken  in  connection  with  the  word  on  the  bust,  the  buried  per- 
son, and  the  tears,  the  whole  may  be  freely  rendered :  "Here 
lies  one  whom  we  mourn.  Seeking  to  enrich  himself,  he  fought, 
pillaged  and  laid  waste.  His  luxurious  life  passed  by  like  a 
rapid  wave." 

Judging  from  the  transitional  character  of  some  of  the  let- 
ters used,  the  author  concludes  that  the  emigration  from  which 
this  inscription  is  derived  took  place  approximately  at  the  time 
of  the  conquests  of  Alexander  the  Great, — which  would  assign 
to  it  a  date  not  far  from  330  B.C. 

3.  The  Work  of  Pre-glacial  Man. — Aside  from  Mathieu's 
Prince  of  Atlantis,  the  Phoenicians  are  the  most  ancient  people 
to  whose  agency  the  marks  on  Dighton  Rock  have  been  seri- 
ously attributed  in  any  printed  source.  But  an  antiquity  incom- 
parably more  remote,  extending  to  perhaps  25,000  years  ago, 
was  suggested  by  E.  E.  Blackman  in  a  paper  prepared  for  the 
Nebraska  Academy  of  Science  in  1917.  He  visited  the  rock 
in  1907,  and  compared  it  with  the  petroglyph  on  the  Univer- 
sity campus  at  Lincoln.  Both  of  these  rocks,  he  believes,  con- 
tain pictographs  of  the  American  Indian,  but  also  another  set, 
with  a  different  manner  of  execution  and  a  different  individu- 


132  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ality,  much  older  and  more  weathered.  Among  the  latter,  on 
the  Dighton  rock,  he  includes  an  X,  single  and  double  "turkey 
tracks,"  a  dotted  C,  a  "three  dots"  figure,  and  a  figure  of 
parallel  lines.  These  ancient  marks,  he  thinks,  for  reasons 
which  are  not  made  very  clear  in  the  paper  which  he  courte- 
ously permitted  me  to  read,  could  not  have  been  carved  where 
the  rocks  now  stand,  and  must  have  been  engraved  before  the 
rocks  were  brought  to  their  present  sites  in  the  glacial  drift. 

4,  A  Druid  Stone  of  Sacrifice  or  of  Memorial. — We  have 
met  with  this  view  as  advocated  by  John  Finch  in  1824.  It  was 
greatly  and  interestingly  elaborated  by  James  N.  Arnold  in 
1888,  with  particular  application  to  the  Narragansett  region. 
According  to  him,  the  Druids  of  Britain  had  colonies  far  to  the 
west,  across  the  great  water.  Their  main  cultural  and  religious 
centre  was  in  the  "summer  land"  of  the  Narragansett  country. 
They  were  worshippers  of  sun  and  moon,  of  stones  and  rocks 
and  the  forces  of  nature.  Though  they  were  eventually  dis- 
placed by  a  mound-building  race  which  had  migrated  from  At- 
lantis by  way  of  Mexico,  and  these  in  turn  by  the  Narragansett 
Indians,  yet,  through  intermarriage,  the  Celtic  blood  and  their 
religious  beliefs  and  practices  persisted  in  the  descendants  of 
their  conquerors;  and  thus  the  inscriptions  on  Dighton  and 
other  sculptured  rocks,  though  Indian,  were  executed  under 
inherited  Druid  influences. 

5.  A  Roman  Catholic  Invocation. — Buckingham  Smith, 
who  was  an  eager  student  of  Mexican  history  and  antiquities, 
suggested  in  1863  a  new  type  of  interpretation  of  a  portion  of 
the  inscription.  In  the  midst  of  the  emblems  of  the  aborigines 
by  which  they  are  surrounded  he  finds  a  series  of  letters  which 
he  believes  to  be  initials  or  cyphers  used  in  the  Catholic  church 
for  words  of  sacred  significance.  We  are  not  told  what  char- 
acters of  the  rock  were  so  taken;  but  there  is  practically  no 
doubt  that  they  were,  as  read  by  him  from  a  single  line  of  the 
Rafn  drawing:  I.  XXX.  I.|\/|-  I-  This  he  interprets  as  mean- 
ing: Jesu  Christo  Santisimo  Jesus  Maria  Josef.  "Mr.  Smith 
suggests  that  these  inscriptions  may  possibly  have  been  derived 
from  Spanish  missionaries  who  penetrated  the  country  at  a 
very  early  period,  of  whom  no  account  has  been  transmitted; 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS  133 

and  refers  to  the  stone  found  in  Onondaga  county,  New  York, 
which  has  upon  it  the  figures  1520,  as  perhaps  determining  the 
period  of  these  memorials." 

6.  A  Chinese  Version. — Among  the  persons  and  peoples 
who  have  fallen  under  suspicion  of  having  fabricated  the  stone 
document  that  we  are  examining,  the  Chinese,  though  vaguely- 
hinted  at,  were  never  given  serious  consideration.  At  last,  how- 
ever, a  keen  modern  detective  followed  out  the  clues  to  the  final 
establishment  of  their  guilt — at  least  to  his  own  satisfaction. 
We  are  unable  in  his  case  to  compare  his  translations  with  the 
characters  transliterated  and  translated,  as  we  have  attempted  to 
do  in  all  previous  cases  when  the  author  furnished  the  necessary 
information.  In  this  case,  we  shall  have  to  content  ourselves 
with  the  results,  without  understanding  how  they  were  reached. 

On  March  1,  1883,  the  Rev.  John  P.  Lundy  made  a  com- 
munication to  the  Numismatic  and  Antiquarian  Society  of 
Philadelphia  "upon  a  remarkable  fact  which  he  had  just  dis- 
covered after  long  study,  viz.,  that  the  Mongolian  symbolism 
of  writing  was  to  be  found  on  the  rock-sculptures  of  Mexico 
and  Central  America,  and  that  by  the  aid  of  the  former  the 
latter  could  be  readily  and  easily  deciphered;  that  these  latter 
were  evidently  of  Mongolian  origin,  and  that  he  had  interpreted 
some  of  the  symbols  in  Stephens'  Yucatan  by  means  of  Mon- 
golian symbols."  On  April  5,  he  read  an  essay  upon  the  Digh- 
ton  Rock  inscription,  which  he  claimed  to  have  translated  by 
means  of  Chinese  radicals,  to  the  following  effect : 

A  chain  or  band  of  folk  from  the  Sunrising  (or  East),  after 
a  long  and  stormy  voyage,  found  the  harbor  of  a  great  island.  It 
was  wild,  uninhabited,  green  and  fruitful.  On  landing  and  tying 
up  our  boats,  we  first  gave  thanks  and  adoration  to  God,  Shang-Ti, 
the  Supreme  Ruler  of  the  Universe.  We  then  sacrificed  a  human 
head  to  the  moon,  burning  it  and  the  body  on  a  round  sun-altar. 
The  next  morning  a  bright  sun  shone  auspiciously  on  all  things 
below;  the  heavenly  omens  and  prognostics,  duly  consulted,  were 
all  favorable.  We  then  struck  across  the  tangled  forest-land  west- 
ward. Our  mouths  hankered  after  something  to  eat  and  drink. 
We  found  the  blue-black  maize  of  our  native  land  and  wild  fruit. 
We  filled  our  rice-kettles.     We  dug  a  pit  under  the  rocks  of  a 


134  DIGHTON  ROCK 

hill-side,  put  in  our  corn  and  fruit,  and  cooked  them.  We  sat 
down  under  the  shady  trees,  covered  with  wild  grapes,  and  ate 
our  fill.  When  the  moon  rose,  we  retired  to  our  hut  or  bough- 
house,  and  slept.  The  next  day  we  pushed  on  westward  through 
the  tangle,  guided  by  the  sun.  The  chief  gave  the  orders  and  led 
the  way.  We  all  followed  in  close  march.  We  crossed  some  low 
hills  and  came  to  green  meadows,  filled  with  wild  rice  or  oats.  A 
stream  of  water  came  down  from  the  hills.  We  stopped ;  we  made 
a  great  feast ;  we  sang  and  danced  around  our  big  kettle ;  its  sweet 
odors  curled  up  high  to  Shang-Ti,  our  God  and  Father  in  heaven. 
This  memorial-stone  or  altar  is  dedicated  to  Shang-Ti,  our  Ruler 
and  Guide  to  this  newly-found  island. 

7.  Diabolism. — Cotton  Mather,  who  first  introduced  our 
rock  to  the  notice  of  the  world,  taught  that  it  was  probable 
that  the  Devil  seduced  the  first  inhabitants  of  America  into 
that  continent,  and — 

therein  aimed  at  the  having  of  them  and  their  Posterity  out  of 
the  sound  of  the  Silver  Trumpets  of  the  Gospel,  then  to  be  heard 
through  the  Roman  Empire;  if  the  Devil  had  any  Expectation,  that 
by  the  Peopling  of  America,  he  should  utterly  deprive  any  Euro- 
peans of  the  Two  Benefits,  Literature  and  Religion,  which  dawned 
upon  the  miserable  World,  one  just  before,  t'other  just  after,  the 
first  famed  Navigation  hither,  'tis  to  be  hop'd  he  will  be  disap- 
pointed of  that  Expectation.* 

Leonard  Bliss,  in  1838,  expressed  wonder  that  Mather,  believ- 
ing that  the  Devil  led  out  a  colony  of  miserable  savages  to 
America  for  the  reasons  stated,  "had  not  also  suggested  the 
idea  that  this  rock  probably  recorded  some  event  connected 
with  that  expedition  of  his  Satanic  Majesty  and  that  the 
strange  characters  were  the  work  of  Tartarian  chisels." 

8.  A  Record  by  Romans  and  by  Christ. — Diabolical  in- 
fluences have  been  humorously  attributed  to  Dighton  Rock. 
But  our  next  authority  seriously  claims  that  some  of  its  records 
were  inscribed  by  the  Son  of  God  himself.  Anyone  who  has 
followed  our  chronicle  thus  far  can  be  no  longer  surprised, 
shocked,  or  convinced  by  extravagant  claims  of  any  sort.  They 
may  arouse  admiration  for  their  ingenuity  and  appreciation  as 

*  Magnolia ,  bk.  i.  ch.  i.  p.  2. 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS  135 

fresh  examples  of  pleasing  fiction.  They  serve  instructively  as 
illustrations  of  curious  psychological  processes  in  the  forma- 
tion of  beliefs.  Impossible  as  they  are,  they  are  nevertheless 
intriguing,  and  deserve  preservation  as  historical  phenomena. 

In  1910  there  was  published  a  beautifully  printed  and  illus- 
trated folio  volume  of  432  pages  under  the  title:  "Fernald 
Genealogy.  Universal  International  Genealogy  and  of  the  An- 
cient Fernald  Families,  ...  By  Charles  Augustus  Fernald, 
M.D.  .  .  .  Principal  of  G.U.S.  &  F.A."  This  extraordinary 
book  purports  to  trace  the  genealogy  of  the  Fernald  family 
back  to  Ava  and  Adam,  our  first  parents,  who  were  created 
4376  B.C.  The  author  claims  to  have  discovered  the  primitive 
language  (which  was  Egyptian)  and  the  primitive  alphabet, 
and  his  method  seems  to  be  to  first  translate  his  ancient  docu- 
ments into  these,  and  thence  into  English  in  a  manner  peculiar 
to  himself.  As  evidential  documents,  there  seems  to  be  noth- 
ing mysterious  and  unreadable  that  does  not  serve  him.  Inci- 
dentally, he  claims  that  George  Washington  was  a  Fernald,  and 
that  he  so  signs  himself  in  his  well-known  signature;  that 
William  Shakespeare  was  the  nom-de-plume  of  Samuel  Wash- 
ington, who  also  was  a  Fernel;  and  even  that  God's  name  in 
the  primitive  language  was  O,  which  means  Fa,  equivalent  to 
Fernald. 

The  lack  of  an  index  and  the  almost  utter  lack  of  system  in 
the  arrangement  of  his  rambling  and  frequently  irrelevant 
material,  make  it  difficult  to  give  an  impartial  and  reliable  ac- 
count of  his  claims  and  of  their  basis.  For  most  assertions,  no 
evidential  basis  is  even  suggested.  Scattered  here  and  there, 
however,  can  be  found  a  few  examples  that  seem  to  show  his 
method  of  interpretation.  Usually  he  gives  no  indications 
whereby  the  reader  can  at  all  follow  and  test  his  readings ;  but 
the  instances  that  follow  may  be  taken  as  typical. 

On  pages  29  to  32  he  gives  "six  all  true  translations  from  a 
grave  tablet  in  ^gypt."  They  differ  utterly.  For  one  of  them, 
he  reverses  the  plate  "to  show  one  mode  of  reading;"  and  in 
an  adjoining  plate  he  shows  "the  inscription  on  Dighton  Rock 
reversed  to  show  one  of  six  readings."  So  far  as  the  reader 
can  judge  from  text  and  plates,  the  six  readings  from  the 


136  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Egyptian  tablet  are  identical  with  the  six  from  the  entirely 
dissimilar  inscription  on  the  rock.  His  method  permits  him, 
evidently,  to  find  any  desired  meaning  anywhere,  and  as  many 
different  translations  from  one  source  as  he  wishes.  On  page 
79  is  figured  a  "coin  of  Alexander."  We  are  told  that  thirteen 
dots  that  appear  on  a  sword-blade  there  represented,  as  also 
on  a  well-known  Egyptian  drawing  that  he  calls  the  "Ham 
Map"  (best  shown  on  page  278),  "represent  stars  that  fore- 
tells U.S.A."  Eleven  o's  are  "a  prophecy  that  child  of  line 
shall  write  the  lines  as  declared  above."  An  A  is  the  pyramid 
in  a  lake  in  Oregon,  the  garden  of  Eden ;  the  white  spot  in  it  is 
"name  pure  God."  An  insignificant  curved  black  line  "is  the 
so-called  Serpent  Line  Mound  at  Adam's  County,  Ohio."  A 
long  thing  that  looks  more  like  a  knobby  club  than  anything 
else  is  "a  line  of  waters  that  represents  Dighton  Rock  and 
River  Taunton."  A  short  pointed  mark  or  wedge  is  "a  fallen 
pike  point  carved  on  said  Rock  prophesying  fall  of  killed  Alex- 
ander and  Sassan."  A  T  is  a  "monogrammic  spelling  of  Noah 
and  Lamar,  Ham,  Araat,  and  turn  the  coin  upside  down  and  T 
symb.  declares  Lamar  Noah  and  Hm.  went  from  Araat  and 
next  symb.  'to  pyramid  Lake,  Oma'."  He  thus  concludes  this 
interesting  study  of  a  single  coin : 

To  be  complete  some  of  capital  point  mentioned  would  enlarge 
this  work,  far  beyond  the  intent  to  more  than  bring  before  all, 
especially  expert  linguists,  positive  evidence  to  glean,  for  the 
granary  store  house  of  history,  crude  sheafs  of  TRUE  unwin- 
nowed  perfect  grains  that  if  well  received — is  to  be  put  into  2nd 
Edition :  the  opponents  will  be,  are  those,  set  forth  in  past  Encycliae 
who  profit  by  ignorance  and  sin. 

It  is  clear  that  Fernald  assigns  any  desired  meaning  to  any 
symbol;  and  there  are  a  few  cases  (as  on  pages  218,  266)  that 
show  that  he  also,  whenever  it  suits  his  convenience,  selects 
letters  at  random  from  different  parts  of  any  source,  and  puts 
them  together  to  form  any  desired  words  or  even  uses  them  as 
initials  of  whatever  he  has  in  mind.  We  may  be  tempted  to 
dismiss  the  whole  elaborate  nonsense  as  unworthy  of  further 
consideration;  but  after  all  it  furnishes  a  beautiful  reductio 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS 


137 


ad  absiirdnm  of  all  those  methods  of  interpretation  that  find 
in  the  rock's  inscriptions  evidence  of  ancient  Phoenician  voy- 
ages or  Icelandic  discoveries. 

In  the  entire  work,  I  find  fifty  cases  of  mention  of  Dighton 
Rock.  The  author  claims  to  have  made  sixteen  photographs 
of  the  rock  in  1903,  but  shows  none  of  them.  Three  times, 
however,  he  reproduces  the  Job  Gardner  drawing,  once  in- 
verted "to  show  one  of  six  readings."  In  addition,  he  gives 
twice  what  appears  to  be  an  original  drawing  of  the  shoreward 
slope  of  the  rock  with  initials  and  other  markings  upon  it. 


Figure  17 — Drawing  of  the  Shoreward  Side  of  Dighton  Rock  by  Charles 

A.  Femald,   1903. 


Of  the  characters  on  the  rock,  mention  is  made  of  an  8,  of 
two  squares  "placed  cornerwise  on  Rock  with  a  line  showing 
them  returned,"  and  of  three  O's,  "ancient  names  of  Trinity," 
one  of  which  was  "added  by  Christ  that  gives  the  time  he  taught 
at  that  locality.''  There  is  no  indication  given  of  the  translation 
of  any  other  marks  on  the  face,  unless  an  XV,  an  XXIII,  and  a 
combination  of  three  letters  resembling  O  Delta  Upsilon  which 
he  mentions,  are  supposed  to  occur  there.  On  the  shoreward 
side  (Figure  17),  we  are  told  that  there  occur,  in  positions  in- 
dicated in  the  drawing,  ( 1 )  the  name  of  Christ  included  within 
that  of  God  (a  C  within  a  circle)  ;  (2)  the  name  of  Washing- 
ton, "distinct  in  first  three  or  four  letters;"  (3)  the  names  of 
Chia  and  Bahman;  (4)  the  name  of  Marcus  Agrippa  over  that 
of  C.  Furnius,  or  of  C.  Furnius  over  Agrippa;  (5)  the  names 


138  DIGHTON  ROCK 

of  Noah  and  Ham;  (6)  an  ancient  compass;  (7)  many  initials. 
Finally  we  are  informed  (page  427)  that  "on  Dighton  Rock 
was  photographed  by  me  characters  that  Marcus  Aggrippa 
Lucius  Furnius  was  conversant  with  as  is  found  in  his  chiseled 
inscription  containing  primitive  language  that  Christ  used  when 
he  conversed  in  'tongues.'  " 

This  is  all  that  we  have  of  interpretation  that  can  be  as- 
signed to  particular  characters.  But,  without  further  under- 
standing its  justification,  we  are  given  a  story  which  may  be 
assembled  from  scattered  passages  as  follows : 

Marcus  Agrippa  Lucius  Furnius,  the  great  Naval  Com- 
mander of  the  Emperor  Augustus,  sailed  with  five  ships  from 
Roma  in  29  B.C.  to  Annona  (Anon,  Omo,  Ama,  Amo,  Au- 
gustii,  Amarica)  where  God  in  the  Garden  of  Adn  first  created 
woman  and  man,  Ava  and  Adm,  and  their  seed.  There,  in  the 
primitive  language  of  lines,  he  engraved  the  fact  and  date  on 
Dighton  Rock,  and  on  it  raised  the  Sea  Green  Flag  given  to 
him  by  the  Emperor ;  and  also  wrote  his  name  over  that  of  C. 
Furnius  (unless  the  latter  was  the  later).  He  returned  from 
Omo  28  B.C.  with  three  ships,  wife,  son  and  daughter.  He  left 
behind  his  son  Graecianus  Julius  Caius  Furnius  and  daughter 
Isabel,  who  commenced  the  Newport  Tower  before  he  left,  for 
defence,  Temple,  and  Monument.  The  son  did  not  complete  the 
Tower,  but  returned  to  Rome  with  one  ship  and  fifty  men.  His 
name  and  his  father's  appear  not  only  on  Dighton  Rock,  but 
also  in  the  Monhegan  Rock  inscription,  which  dates  from 
1013  B.C. 

In  15  A.D.  Christ  sailed  from  Rome  to  Anona,  and  wrote 
his  name  on  Dighton  Rock.  The  following  is  "translated  from 
Dighton  Rock  inscription"  (page  8)  : 

Theos,  I  Christ,  the  son  of  my  Heavenly  Father  God  come  up 
from  the  waters  and  write  my  name  within  that  of  God  on  this 
Rock  and  Engrave  hereon  for  men  and  the  sons  of  all  women  and 
men  for  I  am  sent  by  the  Father  to  teach  that  all  who  believe  in 
me  shall  have  Eternal  Light  for  I  AM  HE  THAT  I  AM :  I  the 
son  of  God  the  Father  and  God  the  Holy  One  of  Israel,  sail  from 
Roma  XV  to  Anona  the  land  of  Omo,  Ama  where  God  from 
Air,  Earth,  Electricity,  Radium,  Water  made  woman  and  man, 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS  139 

Ava,  Adam  in  his  glorious  form  and  image  to  be  children  of  the 
Light  and  Multiply  for  the  glory  of  God.  I  Christ  the  son  of  God 
to  teach  you  to  do  the  works  of  my  God  who  gave  to  you  his  sym- 
bolic letters  OAY  here  shown.  Returned  10  plus  10  plus  III  = 
23  to  Roma,  etc. 

Another  translation  is  given,  purporting  to  be  from  "an 
Egyptian  tomb  at  Eiieithyias"  (pictured  on  page  29  and  again 
inverted  on  page  33),  and  to  be  also  a  translation  of  the  in- 
scription on  Dighton  Rock.  It  is  one  of  "six  all  true  transla- 
tions" of  these  two  records  (page  32) : 

THE    FIFTH    TRANSLATION    HISTORICAL    CORRE- 
SPONDING WITH   INSCRIPTIONS   ON   DIGHTON 
ROCK,   TAUNTON   RIVER,   MASSACHUSETTS, 
UNITED   STATES   OF  AMERICA 
BEAUTIFUL  HIEROGLYPHICS  AND  LINES  STRANGE 

God  the  Eternal  Mother  and  Father  of  Christ  the  Son  to  be 
Born  from  Mary  and  Joseph : — "XV,  I,  Christ  the  Messiah,  came 
by  Ship  from  Roma,  to  be  known  Dighton  Rock,  Taunton  River, 
Massachusetts :  and  say  I,  the  Great  Spirit,  Chisel  My  Name  in 
the  Rock  in  My  Father  Fa  (0=Fa=:God  name)  *  On  the  Rock 
East  of  where  Marcus  Aggrippa  Lucius  Furnius,  Driller  of  the 
Names  of  God  the  Holy  One  and  God  the  Father,  and  from 
former  raised  the  Sea  Green  Flag:  by  Qiart  and  Compass  *  ♦  I 
came  bringing  to  the  Land  of  Omo,  Ama=Annona=Augustii= 
Amarica,  foretold  by  Moses,  the  Serpent  Mound  Land,  bringing 
the  Sacred  Rolls,  Squares  and  Tablets  given  to  Ava  and  Adam 
and  Seven  Laws,  where  Cain  was  born,  given :  I  taught  the  Ante- 
deluvians  from  the  Squares  to  be  One  with  Trinity,  that  willed 
all  United  in  Brotherly  Filial  Love  a  Branch  of  Triune  the  Mani- 
tou  God:  I  taught:  10  and  10  and  3  years  returned  to  Roma: 
Thus  my  Father  God  ordered  and  made  most  perfect.  His  children. 
Female  and  Male,  Daughters  and  Sons  line  to  count  by  the  Stars, 
Completed  in  Messiah  Christ  and  Saviour."  This  and  -much  more 
is  read  in  the  inscription  from  Dighton  Rock,  that  the  tide  conceals 
and  reveals  twice  in  twenty-four  hours ;  fast  disappearing,  without 
(till  this  hundreds  of  years  past)  correct  translation  lost,  which, 
is  honestly,  carefully  presented  for  Justice,  verity. 


140  DIGHTON  ROCK 

In  221  A.D.,  Fnr  Chia,  daughter  of  the  Emperor  of  China, 
a  descendant  of  Fut,  son  of  Ham,  founder  of  China,  and  of  M. 
Agrippa,  with  her  husband  Fna  Bahman  of  Persia,  sailed  with 
two  vessels  from  Fars  (Persia),  with  Agrippa's  Chart  Log  and 
Compass  (the  latter  shown  on  the  Rock),  and  finished  the 
Tower  Temple  at  Newport.  Their  names  are  carved  on  Digh- 
ton  Rock.  The  people  were  fierce  and  bloodthirsty,  and  slew 
Bahman  and  many  of  his  people.  He  died  June  8,  223,  and 
was  buried  (as  was  also  an  infant  child  born  here)  under  the 
Tower.  Their  eldest  son,  F.  Sassan,  also  died  on  December  10, 
and  was  buried  with  his  armor  on,  and  with  his  sword  and 
spear,  near  the  mouth  of  the  river  TSEON  or  Taunton  (a  pic- 
ture of  the  Fall  River  skeleton  is  shown  on  page  8).  With 
another  son,  Chia  visited  the  Serpent  Mound,  built  by  Ava  and 
Adam.  She  died  May  6,  230 ;  and  her  features  are  sculptured 
on  the  stone  at  Copan  in  Central  America.  One  son  became 
ancestor  of  many  great  nations  in  Anona;  a  second  went  to 
China  and  was  ancestor  of  Confucius ! 

9.  Minor  suggestions. — A  number  of  these  have  been 
made,  without  receiving  any  elaboration  in  detail. 

a.  Post-Columbian  white  men. — We  have  seen  that  Ken- 
dall related  two  traditions,  attributing  the  sculptures  to  English 
sailors.  Samuel  A.  Drake  concedes  that  it  is  generally  admitted 
that  the  inscription  is  Indian ;  but  adds  that  if  the  work  of  white 
men,  it  would  strengthen  the  theory  of  Verrazano's  presence 
in  these  waters.  Laing  asked  what  there  is  to  prove  that  these 
marks  are  not  the  work  of  early  European  settlers,  or  the 
scratches  of  some  idle  sailor  boy.  Edward  Everett  also,  it  will 
be  remembered,  thought  that  there  was  a  possibility  that  they 
were  made  by  some  Anglo-American  between  1620  and  1675. 
Schoolcraft,  in  his  review  of  1839,  suggested  that  the  English 
or  Roman  characters  might  have  been  added  to  the  Indian 
marks  by  some  idle  boy  or  more  idle  man,  in  sport.  Baxter 
informs  us  that  some  writings  on  the  Maine  coast,  claimed  to  be 
Norse,  are  known  to  have  been  made  by  boys,  for  sport. 
Squier  also,  in  his  paper  of  1848,  was  of  the  opinion  that  some 
of  the  lines  were  preserved  from  disappearance,  or  even  brought 


H-I 


Q 


u> 


;1h 


U) 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS  141 

into  existence,  by  the  constant  rubbing  to  which  they  are  ex- 
posed from  the  sticks  and  canes  of  visitors. 

b.  Pirates  and  Buried  Treasure. — We  have  the  authority 
of  Kendall  also  for  a  vague  tale  of  pirates  who  made  the  in- 
scription. Such  rumors  are  not  yet  dead  in  the  neighborhood. 
A  resident  of  the  town  tells  me  that  when  he  was  a  boy  he  knew 
an  old  man  who  claimed  that  he  could  read  the  inscription  on 
the  rock.  Its  purport  was  to  the  effect  that  "I,  so-and-so,  have 
buried  treasure  in  such-and-such  a  position,  measured  thus- 
and-so  from  this  rock."  In  connection  with  such  tales,  we  have 
already  noticed  James  Winthrop's  story  of  much  digging  for 
treasure  in  the  vicinity,  and  Kendall's  mention  of  it.  Accord- 
ing to  the  American  Whig  of  Taunton,  there  seems  to  have 
been  a  recrudescence  of  such  activities  about  1850.  "Some 
think  that  here  exists  another  El  Dorado.  Others  suppose  that 
some  piratical  freebooters  hid  money  near,  and  that  on  this  rock 
they  recorded  the  means  of  finding  it.  The  more  probable 
hypothesis  is  that  the  Northmen,  being  about  to  leave  this 
country  for  their  own,  with  an  idea  of  returning  to  plant  a 
colony,  buried  all  their  wealth  and  chiseled  upon  this  rock  a 
sort  of  chart  by  which  the  earth  might  afterwards  be  made  to 
yield  up  its  trust.  The  owner  finds  the  frequent  visits  of 
fortune-seekers  so  annoying  that  he  threatens  to  blow  up  the 
rock."  A  correspondent  who  lived  near  the  rock  years  ago 
knew  an  elderly  lady,  who,  when  she  was  a  girl,  knew  of  a 
treasure-hunter  whose  enterprise  terminated  when  he  slipped 
and  broke  his  leg.  The  most  circumstantial  tale  that  I  hear 
in  the  neighborhood  is  the  following,  related  by  a  man  who 
knew  the  hero  of  the  tale  when  he  was  a  boy.  The  said  hero 
dreamed  for  three  nights  running  that  he  had  found  treasure 
near  Dighton  Rock.  Consequently  he  went  to  it  at  low  tide  and 
began  digging.  He  quickly  noticed  that  the  tide  began  to  rise 
almost  immediately,  although  it  was  long  before  the  time  for  it 
to  do  so.  Thus  interrupted  in  his  digging,  he  turned  toward 
the  river.  In  the  mist  before  him  he  saw  the  devil,  equipped 
with  all  his  paraphernalia  of  tail  and  horns  and  cloven  hoof, 
mocking  and  laughing  at  him.  Convinced  that  the  treasure  was 
effectually  guarded  he  fled  in  terror. 


142  DIGHTON  ROCK 

c.  The  Work  of  Nature  Only. — In  the  earhest  period  of 
this  history,  we  found  a  few  who  beHeved  that  nature  alone, 
with  its  weather-cracks  and  veins  and  stains,  was  the  sole  de- 
signer of  the  figures  on  the  rock.  Besides  the  other  suggestions 
referred  to  above,  Laing  hints  that  the  "Deighton  Written 
Rock  would  perhaps  be  the  better  of  a  certificate  from  the  min- 
eralogist, as  well  as  the  antiquary."  Webb  tells  us  of  one  per- 
son who  was  positively  sure  that  there  is  no  inscription  on  the 
rock.  In  a  letter  of  February  4,  1838,  he  complains  to  Bart- 
lett :  "John  Whipple  laughs  at  the  whole  affair,  denies  that  there 
are  any  such  figures  as  we  represent  on  the  Tiverton  Rocks, 
having  visited  them  many  times,  that  there  are  hundreds  of  just 
such  rocks  in  our  Bay,  all  of  which  were  marked  by  the  action 
of  water,  stones,  &c.,  and  that  these  markings  have  by  the  con- 
jurings  of  our  imaginations  been  fashioned  into  the  shapes 
delineated  on  our  plates.  He  considers  the  Inscription  Rocks, 
Animal  Magnetism,  &  Phrenology,  among  the  humbugs  of  the 
day."  Apparently  he  refers  to  the  same  person  in  his  letter  of 
sixteen  years  later  to  John  Ordronaux,  in  which  he  says :  "One 
denied  that  any  kind  of  Inscription  was  on  the  Assonet  Rock ; 
declaring  that  the  markings  were  mere  lusus  Naturae;  or  at 
most,  simply  the  results  of  combined  action  of  wind,  water,  ice 
and  kindred  influences." 

d.  These  miscellaneous  theories  would  be  incomplete  with- 
out mention  of  one  which  I  believe  to  be  a  complete  fabrication. 
A  boy  of  fourteen  or  fifteen  years  residing  temporarily  in  Digh- 
ton  told  me  that  he  could  read  the  inscription  on  the  rock.  The 
characters,  he  said,  are  all  Indian  names.  He  knew  a  dozen  or 
so  of  them,  but  a  friend  of  his  once  knew  them  all,  about  fifty  in 
number.  He  could  remember  only  the  names  Leo,  Viola,  Var- 
cana — the  first  being  the  name  of  the  infant  pictured  there.  He 
could  not  describe  the  characters  that  spelled  these  names,  ex- 
cept as  different  kinds  and  groups  of  X's;  nor  could  he  draw 
them.  He  would  have  to  show  me  on  the  rock  itself, —  and  we 
never  found  opportunity  to  go  to  the  rock  together.  He  claimed 
to  have  studied  the  Indian  language  and  writing  at  a  high 
school  in  Vermont.    Among  the  neighbors  he  had  the  reputa- 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS  143 

tion  of  telling  big  stories ;  one  said  he  was  "just  a  plain  liar ;" 
and  a  report  from  the  school  where  he  gained  his  unusual  ability 
to  read  Indian  writings  naturally  disclosed  the  fact  that  nothing 
of  the  sort  had  ever  been  taught  there.  But  it  is  worth  while 
to  have  a  "plain  lie,"  especially  when  so  picturesquely  developed, 
to  add  to  our  collection. 

It  will  be  helpful  toward  a  grasp  of  this  complex  study  to 
make  a  few  summarizing  statements.  Of  independent  at- 
tempts to  represent  faithfully  the  appearance  of  the  inscrip- 
tions, in  whole  or  in  part,  aside  from  my  own,  I  have  found 
forty-two.  The  earliest  was  in  1680.  Twenty-two  of  them 
are  drawings  of  the  face,  but  six  of  these  are  now  undiscover- 
able.  One  is  a  drawing  of  inscriptions  on  the  shoreward  slope. 
Two  are  ink-impressions,  one  a  plaster  cast.  The  remaining 
sixteen  are  photographs,  of  which  the  earliest,  an  alleged 
daguerreotype  of  1840,  cannot  now  be  found.  For  all  the 
photographs  except  three  the  supposed  artificial  lines  were 
brightened  by  means  of  chalking  or  some  similar  process. 
Many  of  these  depictions  have  been  described  in  these  pages, 
and  an  enumeration  and  description  of  all  of  them  will  be  given 
in  the  next  chapter. 

Of  theories  advanced  to  account  for  the  origin  of  the  in- 
scriptions, in  whole  or  in  part,  we  might  enumerate  more  or 
fewer  according  to  whether  we  include  vague  allusions  and 
statements  of  mere  possibility  as  well  as  completely  formed  and 
defended  theories,  according  to  the  degree  to  which  we  make 
distinctions  among  those  that  differ  only  slightly,  and  accord- 
ing to  whether  we  admit  parodies  as  well  as  seriously  enter- 
tained views.  Our  list  below  includes  all  of  these  varieties,  and 
gives  a  separate  number  to  each  one  that,  though  it  refer  to  the 
same  people  as  another,  may  be  considered  a  different  and  inde- 
pendent theory.  In  a  parallel  column,  with  separate  numbers, 
are  the  names  of  those  who  have  presented  a  translation,  com- 
plete or  partial,  in  harmony  with  the  parallel  theory ;  and  even 
an  assignment  of  meaning  to  one  or  two  figures  or  characters 
is  classed  for  this  purpose  as  jl  translation.  The  order  is 
roughly  that  of  the  antiquity  issigned  to  the  inscription : 


144 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


THEORIES 

1.  Not  satisfactorily  explained. 

2.  The  work  of  Nature  only. 

3.  A  pre-glacial  race. 

4.  Egyptian  priests,  2700  B.C.    (a  criti- 

cism, not  a  serious  theory). 

5.  In,  Prince  of  Atlantis,  2102  B.C. 

6.  PhcEnicians  or  Carthaginians. 

7.  A  definite  Carthaginian  expedition. 

8.  Tyrians  and  Jews,  about  1000  B.C. 

9.  Another  Phoenician  adventurer,  about 

330  B.C. 

10.  A  Hebrew  people;  the  Lost  Tribes. 

11.  Persians. 

12.  Trojans. 

13.  .iEgypto-Drosticks  (a  hoax). 

14.  Egyptians. 

15.  Libyans. 

16.  Romans ;  also  Christ  and  others. 

17.  Scythians  or  Tartars. 

18.  Scythian  Celtic  Druids. 

19.  Japanese. 

20.  Chinese. 

21.  The  Norse  Colony  of  Thorfinn,  about 

1008  A.D. 

22.  The  Norse  Bjarna  (a  parody). 

23.  Prince  Aladoc,  about  1170  A.D. 

24.  The  Devil  (humorously  suggested  as 

what   ought   to   have   been   Cotton 
Mather's  theory). 

25.  An  early  native  race,  predecessor  of 

the  Indians. 

26.  The  Indians,  by  accident  in  sharpen- 

ing arrows. 

27.  The  Indians,  as  an  actual  record  or 

records. 

28.  Miguel  Cortereal,  1511. 

29.  A  Roman  Catholic  missionary,  about 

1520. 

30.  Verrazano's  expedition. 

31.  Other  early  English  sailors. 

32.  Pirates. 

33.  American  colonists  or  boys. 

34.  Modern  visitors  with  sticks  and  canes. 

35.  Initials  undoubtedly  carved  by  visitors 

not  Indian,  since  1620,  some  recent. 


TRANSLATIONS 


1.  The  author. 

2.  Mathieu. 

3.  Yates  and  Moulton. 

4.  Gebelin. 

5.  Ira  Hill. 

6.  Onffroy  de  Thoron. 

7.  Samuel  Harris. 


8.  Dammartin. 

9.  Fernald. 


10.  Lundy. 

11.  Magnusen. 

13.  Gravier. 

14.  Lowell. 


12.  Rafn. 


15.  Kendall's  Mohawk  Chief. 

16.  Chingwauk.  17.  John  Davis. 

18.  The  author. 

19.  Buckingham  Smith. 


20.  Perhaps  Danforth. 


Excluding  four  theories  that  were  not  seriously  advanced, 
and  nine  others  that  have  been  barely  suggested  as  possibilities 
without  any  defence  of  them,  there  remain  twenty-two  theories 
that  have  been  definitely  held  and  defended. 

In  connection  with  this  amazing  variety  of  theories  as  to 
origin  and  of  beliefs  as  to  meaning  of  the  inscriptions  in  gen- 


A  MEDLEY  OF  RECENT  OPINIONS  145 

eral,  it  is  exceedingly  interesting  to  bring  together  the  dif- 
ferent meanings  that  have  been  assigned  to  particular  figures. 
The  entire  assembly  of  lines  to  the  left  of  the  large  human 
figure  have  been  interpreted  as  a  Phoenician  date,  an  Egyptian 
date,  zodiacal  constellations,  Thorfinn's  ship  and  its  surround- 
ings, the  camp  at  Straumfiord,  the  village  of  the  Assonets.  One 
character  within  it,  sometimes  drawn  like  the  letter  P,  has  been 
a  Phoenician  letter,  an  Egyptian  monogram,  a  rune,  a  constel- 
lation, a  noose-trap.  The  human  figure  itself  has  played  the 
role  of  Neptune,  Gudrida,  Thorfinn,  a  person  killed  by  an  ani- 
mal, a  hunter,  an  idol,  the  Chief  Mong,  the  constellation  Virgo, 
the  first  American  king  and  tyrant.  The  small  figure  at  its  feet 
possesses  versatility  enough  to  pose  as  a  priest,  as  Chief  Mong's 
sister,  Thorfinn's  baby  son  Snorre,  Horus  as  son  of  the  virgin 
goddess,  a  buried  person  with  tears  upon  and  near  him,  a  part 
of  the  constellation  Leo,  a  symbol  of  the  second  month  of  the 
tenth  year  of  the  reign  of  Solomon,  and  a  portion  of  the  date 
1511  with  circles  above  and  below  it.  The  clear-cut  triangular 
figures  in  the  uppermost  central  region  are  a  Carthaginian 
camp,  a  seer's  lodge,  a  collection  of  constellations  about  the 
northern  Pole,  a  deer-trap,  a  shield.  The  apparently  alphabetic 
characters  near  the  centre  are  the  name  Thorfins,  the  name 
Cortereal,  the  constellation  Aries,  the  constellation  Gemini,  the 
Icelandic  word  OR,  the  Phoenician  words  shalal  le-nagar  oneg, 
or  a  collection  of  indecipherable  non-alphabetic  lines.  The 
famous  animal  below  this  has  figured  as  a  beaver,  an  unnamed 
dangerous  animal,  a  deer,  a  composite  animal  with  insect's 
wing,  a  bull,  a  winged  and  horned  Pegasus,  an  unknown  Asiatic 
animal,  a  leopard,  a  lynx,  a  constellation,  a  collection  of  leaves 
and  vines  symbolizing  a  fertile  land,  a  map  of  the  coasts  of 
Europe, — and  it  might  perhaps  just  as  well  represent  a  coon,  a 
skunk,  or  a  chipmunk.  The  lines  next  rightward  of  the  three 
last  mentioned  figures  include  a  deer-trap,  a  human  trunk,  a 
horse,  a  constellation  or  two,  Thorfinn's  shield,  Thorfinn  him- 
self, a  canopy  over  a  throne,  a  wooden  idol,  a  map  of  the  Medi- 
terranean. We  might  thus  continue  at  great  length ;  but  enough 
has  surely  been  given  to  discourage  anyone  acquainted  with 
these  facts  from  making  further  attempts  to  assign  unsupported 
meanings  to  any  portions  of  the  inscription. 


CHAPTER  IX 

REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  DIGHTON  ROCK  INSCRIPTION 

The  many  drawings  and  photographs  of  the  rock's  in- 
scribed surface  are  fully  as  important  historically  and  psycho- 
logically as  are  the  theories  that  we  have  surveyed.  They  are 
also  useful,  though  to  a  surprisingly  small  extent,  in  helping 
to  solve  the  difficult  problem  as  to  what  was  actually  inscribed. 
No  single  one  of  them  by  itself  can  be  at  all  trusted.  With  few 
exceptions,  they  are  based  upon  chalkings  of  selected  lines  upon 
the  rock  which  are  necessarily  inaccurate,  because  it  is  abso- 
lutely impossible  for  anyone,  in  the  brief  time  devoted  to  the 
task,  to  make  his  selections  correctly.  Yet  each  informs  us  as  to 
what  someone  has  seen,  and  thus  suggests  things  to  look  for 
and  to  confirm  or  correct  after  more  adequate  study.  Our  final 
decisions  must  be  based  upon  prolonged  and  minute  study  of 
photographs  of  the  natural  unaltered  surface.  My  own  recent 
ones,  taken  by  flashlight  and  without  perspective  distortion  are 
beyond  question  the  best  yet  produced  for  this  purpose.  But 
they  need  to  be  supplemented  by  others,  taken  under  different 
conditions  of  lighting.  I  shall  describe  several  which  I  have 
found  serviceable  in  this  way. 

All  of  the  drawings  made  down  to  the  year  1834  have  al- 
ready been  described  and  are  again  listed  below.  Following 
these,  all  traceable  depictions  of  later  date  are  mentioned,  to- 
gether with  the  circumstances  of  production  of  each. 

Reproductions  of  each  by  other  authors  are  listed,  the  Fig- 
ure in  this  volume  where  it  is  shown  is  given,  and,  following 
the  abbreviation  "C.S.M.,"  the  plate,  volume  and  page  of  its 
reproduction  in  the  Publications  of  the  Colonial  Society  of 
Massachusetts  are  indicated. 

1.  John  Danforth  Drawing,  October,  1680. 

a.  Original,  probably  that  of  Greenwood's  Letter  B, 

146 


REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  INSCRIPTION    147 

in  British  Museum.  About  3x8.  Unpub- 
lished copy  in  Royal  Society  Register.  Figure  7. 
C.S.M.  Plate  XV,  xviii.  288-289. 

b.  Cotton  Mather's  copy  of  a,  in  Wonderful  Works, 
1690.  ^  X  3,  Reproduced  by  Mather  in  his  later 
amplified  drawings.  Figure  8.  C.S.M.  Plates 
III,  VI,  xviii.  242,  254-255. 

c.  Greenwood's  copy  of  a,  1730,  in  British  Museum. 
Reproduced  by  Bushnell,  1908.  C.S.M.  Plate 
XI,  xviii.  274-275. 

d.  Copy  of  c,  in  Society  of  Antiquaries  of  London, 
1732.  Reproduced  by  Lort,  1787,  and  thence  by 
Rafn,  1837;  Winsor,  1889;  Mallery,  1893.  Fig- 
ure 6.  C.S.M.  Plates  II,  III,  xviii.  238-239, 
242. 

2.  Cotton  Mather's  Drawing,  1712.    Only  the  lower  part 

new,  by  an  unknown  draughtsman.  This  part  is 
always  inserted  upside-down. 

a.  Original  unknown.  About  1^x3^.  Repro- 
duced in  Philosophical  Transactions  1714,  in 
Philosophical  Transactions  Abridged,  1721,  Lort, 
Rafn,  Winsor,  Mallery.  Figure  6.  C.S.M. 
Plates  II,  IV,  VI,  xviii.  238-239,  246,  254-255. 

b.  Mather  Broadside,  possibly  about  1714.  Orig- 
inals in  Massachusetts  Historical  Society  and  Yale 
University  Library.  C.S.M.  Plates  V,  VI,  xviii. 
250,  254-255. 

3.  John  Smibert's  Drawing,  about  1729.    Lost. 

4.  George  Berkeley's  Drawing,  about  1729.    Lost. 

5.  Isaac  Greenwood's  Drawing,  September,   1730.     As- 

sisted by  Rev.  Mr.  Fisher. 

a.  Probable  original,  in  Greenwood's  Letter  B,  in 
British  Museum.  3>^x9>4.  C.S.M.  Plate 
XIV,  xviii.  284. 

b.  Greenwood's  copy  of  a,  in  British  Museum.  Re- 
produced by  Bushnell,  1908.  C.S.M.  Plate  XI, 
xviii.  274-275. 

c.  Copy  of  b,  in  Society  of  Antiquaries  of  London, 


148  DIGHTON  ROCK 

1732.  Reproduced  by  Lort,  1787,  and  thence  by 
Rafn,  Winsor,  Mallery.  Figure  6.  C.S.M. 
Plate  VII,  xviii.  258. 

6.  John  Winthrop's   Drawing,   before   1744.     Not  pre- 

served. 

7.  Drawing  by  Ezra  Stiles,  June  6,  1767,  In  Yale  Univer- 

sity Library.     7^  x  24,^.     C.S.M.     Plate  XIX, 
xix.  50-51. 
Some  further  drawings  of  particular  figures,  of  same 
date,  in  Itinerary  in  Yale  University  Library, 

8.  Drawing  by  Ezra  Stiles,  July  15,  1767,  in  Yale  Uni- 

versity Library.    7^  x  12^.    Figure  9.    C.S.M. 
Plate  XX,  xix.  58-59. 
Some  further  drawings  of  particular  figures,  of  same 
date,  in  American  Academy  of  Arts  and  Sciences. 

9.  Drawing  by  Ezra  Stiles,  July  16,  1767,  in  Massachu- 

setts Historical  Society.  9  x  23.    C.  S.  M.    Plate 

XXI,  xix.  66-67. 

10.  Ink-impression  by  Elisha  Paddack,  August,   1767,  in 

American  Academy  of  Arts  and  Sciences,  never 
reproduced ;  incomplete.  26x41.  Another  small 
fragment  in  Stiles's  Itinerary,  in  Yale  University 
Library. 

11.  Stephen  Sewall's  Drawing,  September  13,  1768. 

a.  Original,  in  Peabody  Museum.  36  x  120. 
C.S.M.     Plate  XXII,  xix.  74-75. 

b.  John  Winthrop's  copy  of  a.  Reproduced  by  Lort, 
1787,  and  thence  (unless  from  ^)  by  Rafn,  Win- 
sor,   Mallery.      Figure   6.      C.S.M.      Plates    II, 

XXII,  XXXI,  xviii.  238-239,  xix.  74-75,  146- 
147. 

c.  Gebelin's  copy,  1781.  Reproduced  in  L' Independ- 
ent of  Fall  River,  July  14,  1915.    C.S.M.     Plate 

XXIII,  xix.  82-83. 

d.  Dammartin's  copy  of  c.  Figure  13.  C.S.M. 
Plates  XXIII,  XXXI,  xix.  82-83,  146-147. 

e.  Hale's  copy  of  a,  1834.  Copy  of  this,  sent  by 
Webb  to  Rafn,  may  have  been  latter's  source. 


REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  INSCRIPTION    149 

12.  Ink-Impression  by  James  Winthrop,  August  14,  1788. 

a.  Original  not  discoverable.  About  48  x  120  prob- 
ably. 

h.  Pantographic  copy  of  a  by  Winthrop,  published 
in  Memoirs  of  American  Academy  of  Arts  and 
Sciences,  1804.  Reproduced  by  Warden  1825, 
Rafn,  Roux  de  Rochelle  1853,  Winsor,  Mallery. 
Figure  6.    C.S.M.    Plate  XXIV,  xix.  90-91. 

c.  Copy  of  alphabetical  characters  of  h,  by  Samuel 
Harris,  about  1807.  Figure  11.  C.S.M.  Plate 
XXVII,  xix.  114. 

13.  Drawing  by  Ezra  Stiles,  October  3,  1788.    Incomplete; 

not  discoverable. 

14.  Baylies   Drawing,   by   William   Baylies,   John   Smith, 

Samuel    West,    Joseph    Gooding,    and    possibly 

William  Baylies  Jr.,  about  July  15,  1789. 
a.  Dr.  Baylies's  copy,  sent  to  American  Academy  of 

Arts  and  Sciences.    Not  discoverable. 
h.  Smith-Stiles    copy,    in    Massachusetts    Historical 

Society.     12x22.     Figure   10.     C.S.M.     Plate 

XXV,  xix.    98-99. 

c.  Smith-Upham  copy,  in  Massachusetts  Historical 
Society.  7^2  x  19.  C.S.M.  Plate  XXV,  xix. 
98-99. 

d.  Joseph  Gooding  copy,  in  possession  of  heirs  of 
Sophia  F.  Brown.     7^^x20^.     C.S.M.     Plate 

XXVI,  xix.  106-107.    A  copy  by  H.  I.  Beckwith, 
1864,  in  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society. 

e.  Webb  copy,  made  probably  from  d  or  from  some 
fifth  original  in  February,  1830,  known  as  "Dr. 
Baylies  and  Mr.  Goodwin's  1790,"  published  by 
Rafn,  1837.  Reproduced  by  Aall,  1838;  Laing, 
1844;  Schoolcraft,  1851  (combined  with  1837 
drawing)  ;  Winsor,  Mallery.  Figure  6.  C.S.M. 
Plates  11,  XXVI,  xviii.  238-239,  xix.   106-107. 

15.  Edward  A.  Kendall's  Painting  and  Engraving,  1807. 

a.  Oil  Painting,  in  Peabody  Museum.     17>^  x26>4. 


150  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Figure  12.     C.S.M.     Plate  XXVIII,  xix.  122- 
123. 

b.  Engraving  after  a.  9^  x  23.  Published  in 
Memoirs  of  American  Academy  of  Arts  and 
Sciences,  1809.  C.S.M.  Plate  XXIX,  xix.  130- 
131. 

c.  Misleading  copy  of  b,  published  by  Rafn,  1837, 
and  thence  in  Dansk  Kimstblad,  1837;  Anderson, 
1904;  Winsor,  Mallery.  Figure  6.  C.S.M. 
Plate  II,  xviii.  238-239. 

16.  Lithograph  by  Job  Gardner,  1812   (or  1821?). 

a.  Only  one  example  of  the  original  lithograph  is 
known  to  the  writer.  Not  reproduced,  because 
copy  c  is  sufficiently  accurate. 

b.  Dissected  copy  by  Ira  Hill,  1831.  C.S.M.  Plate 
XXX  (with  modifications),  xix.  138-139. 

c.  Copy  published  by  Rafn,  1837,  thence  by  Lossing, 
1850  (thence  by  Fernald,  1910)  ;  S.  A.  Drake, 
1875;  Winsor,  Mallery.  Figure  6.  C.S.M. 
Plate  XXX,  xix.  138-139. 

17.  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society  View  or  Sketch,  by 

J.  R.  Bartlett,  December,  1834. 

a.  Original,  in  Royal  Library,  Copenhagen.  9  x  11^. 
C.S.M.    Plate  XXXIII,  xx.  298-299. 

b.  Rafn's  amended  and  amplified  copy,  published 
by  Rafn,  1837.  Reproduced  by  Aal,  1838; 
Schoolcraft,  1839;  Laing,  1844;  Lelewel,  1852; 
Horsford,  1887;  Winsor,  1889;  Bangor  Com- 
mercial, 1897;  Anderson,  1904.  C.S.M.  Plate 
XXXIII,  XX.  298-299. 

18.  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society's  Drawing,  by  a  com- 

mittee of  the  society,   about   September  4    (re- 
touched December  11),  1834. 

a.  Original,  in  Royal  Library,  Copenhagen.  15  x  35. 
Figure  14.    C.S.M.    Plate  XXXIV,  xx.  308-309. 

b.  Rafn's  copy  with  additions,  published  by  Rafn 
1837.     Reproduced  by  Aal,  1838;  Barber,  1839; 
Beamish,    1841;    Laing,    1844;    Hermes,    1844; 


/    v~ 


*^:^^ 


13  .    y  v_ 


Fig.  20.     By  A.   M.  Harrison  and   W".   B.   Gardner,   1875 


Fig.  21.    By  Frank  S.  Davis,  1894 


Fig.  22.     ]]y  tin-  Old  Colony   Historical  Society.   1902 

Examjiles   of    photographs    interpreting   the    inscription    by   chalk- 
ing its  supposed  characters 

Facing  pai/c  150 


REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  INSCRIPTION    151 

Guillot,  1844;  Holmberg,  1848;  Schoolcraft, 
1851;  Gravier,  1875;  Andree,  1878;  Mallery, 
1889;  Onffroy  de  Thoron,  1889;  Gaffarel,  1892; 
Neukomm,  1896;  Brittain,  1903.  Figure  6. 
C.S.M.    Plate  XXXIV,  xx.  308. 

19.  Drawing  by  Edward  E.  Hale,  July  31,  1839.  Not 
preserved. 

In  his  manuscript  Diary  there  is  a  small  crudely  drawn 
picture  of  the  "animal"  of  the  rock,  with  the  letters  O.  .  .X  above 
it,  which  he  remarks  is  the  nearest  he  could  see  to  the  pretended 
Norse  inscription;  and  he  expresses  as  his  own  view  the  prob- 
ability that  the  Indians  cut  the  marks  after  the  introduction  of 
metal  tools,  obtained  possibly  from  the  Northmen.  He  says 
further,  however,  that  he  "took  a  copy"  of  the  inscription ;  but 
in  a  letter  to  S.  F.  Haven  on  October  18,  1864,  he  remarks  that 
this  drawing  "has  long  since  disappeared." 

20.  Drawing  by  John  W.  Barber,  1839.  Figure  18. 
C.S.M.    Figure  6,  xx.  379. 


Figure  18— Drawing  of  Dighton  Rock  by  John  W.  Barber,  1839. 

This  drawing  was  published  in  Barber's  Historical  Collec- 
tions of  Massachusetts,  page  117.  In  his  preface  he  says  that 
"the  drawings  for  the  numerous  engravings  interspersed 
throughout  the  book  were,  with  few  exceptions,  taken  on  the 
spot  by  the  author  of  this  work."    The  dotted  line  in  the  draw- 


152  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ing  indicates,  according  to  the  author,  the  level  to  which  the 
rock  is  generally  covered  at  high  water.  He  should  have  said 
"generally  uncovered  at  low  water."  On  the  same  page  is 
another  cut,  showing  the  rock  as  seen  from  the  opposite  side  of 
the  river,  with  a  wide  stretch  of  shore  visible  on  either  side 
of  it. 

This  drawing  of  the  inscription  has  hitherto  been  repro- 
duced, apparently,  only  by  Goodrich,  1848,  and  by  Nason,  1874. 

21.  Daguerreotype  of  1840.    Not  discoverable. 

In  1854  Dr.  Webb  claimed  that  he  had  in  his  possession  a 
daguerreotype  of  Dighton  Rock  taken  in  1840.  No  trace  of 
it  can  now  be  discovered.  The  date  assigned,  though  early,  is 
perfectly  possible. 

22.  Drawing  by  the  Chevalier  Friedrichsthal,  1840.  Not 
discoverable. 

Evidence  for  this  drawing  is  contained  in  a  manuscript  let- 
ter, the  writer  saying  that  he  made  a  sketch  of  the  rock,  and 
calling  attention  to  the  animal  and  the  adjoining  characters  XV. 
Friedrichsthal  was  attached  to  the  Austrian  legation  at  Wash- 
ington. 

23.  Drawing  of  the  alleged  Roman  or  English  letters  in 
the  central  part  of  the  inscription,  by  Henry  R.  Schoolcraft, 
August,  1847.    Figure  15.    C.S.M.    Plate  XXXV,  xx.  316. 

The  circumstances  of  the  making  of  this  drawing  have  al- 
ready been  described.  The  plate  on  which  we  present  it  shows 
also  the  combination  of  the  1789  and  1837  drawings  which 
Schoolcraft  published  in  1851. 

24.  Daguerreotype  by  Captain  Seth  Eastman  and  a  "pro- 
fessed daguerreotypist  of  Taunton,"  1853. 

a.  Original  daguerreotype,  in  possession  of  the  Historical 
Society  of  Pennsylvania.     Figure  16. 

h.  A  second  daguerreotype  in  possession  of  Massachusetts 
Historical  Society. 

c.  Reproduction  of  a,  in  Schoolcraft's  Indian  Tribes,  1854, 
iv.  120.    Figure  14.     C.S.M.    Plate  XXXVI,  xx.  324. 

Schoolcraft  relates  the  circumstances  under  which  this  first 
extant  photographic  representation  of  the  rock  was  made.  It 
was  taken  during  the  summer  of  1853.     "By  this  process  of 


REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  INSCRIPTION    153 

transferring  the  original  inscription  from  the  rock,  it  is  shown 
to  be  a  uniform  piece  of  Indian  pictography.  A  professed 
daguerreotypist  from  Taunton  attended  the  artist  (Capt.  E.) 
on  this  occasion.  The  lines  were  traced  with  chalk,  with  great 
care  and  labor,  preserving  their  original  width.  On  applying 
the  instrument  to  the  surface,  the  impression  herewith  pre- 
sented was  given." 

At  least  two  daguerreotypes  were  made  on  this  occasion. 
One  of  them  came  into  possession  of  the  Rev.  Mortimer  Blake, 
who  moved  to  Taunton  about  1856,  and  through  his  sons  it 
passed  to  the  Massachusetts  Historical  Society  in  1917.  The 
other  is  in  possession  of  the  Historical  Society  of  Pennsylvania. 
The  man  who  is  pictured  in  both  of  them  is  doubtless  Captain 
Eastman. 

This  depiction  of  the  inscription  has  been  the  one  chosen 
for  purposes  of  illustration  by  Bryant  and  Gay,  1876;  F.  S. 
Drake,  1884;  McLean,  1892;  Mallery,  1893;  Andrews,  1894; 
E.  E.  Free,  1926. 

25.  Lithograph  by  George  A.  Shove,  1864.  6^x9>^ 
inches.    C.S.M.    Plate  XXXVII,  xx.  332. 

George  A.  Shove  was  a  resident  of  Dighton,  a  descendant 
of  the  Rev.  George  Shove,  minister  of  Taunton,  who  in  1677 
became  one  of  the  six  purchasers  and  original  proprietors  of 
Assonet  Neck.  He  was  born  about  1824,  and  was  lame  from 
his  childhood.  He  held  many  responsible  positions  in  town 
offices,  and  for  a  time  was  local  postmaster.  He  was  ingenious 
with  tools,  possessed  a  fair  degree  of  skill  as  an  artist,  and  had 
some  gift  as  a  writer.    He  died  in  1890. 

His  lithograph  makes  no  pretence  at  a  full  and  accurate 
representation  of  the  inscription,  being  intended  evidently  only 
to  give  a  general  idea  of  it  and  of  the  rock  in  its  surroundings. 
There  is  only  one  figure  in  the  sketchily  traced  inscription  that 
is  at  all  unusual — the  double  parallelogram  with  parallel  cross- 
lines  to  the  right  of  the  picture  of  the  animal.  Besides  the 
lithograph.  Shove  made  at  least  one  other  drawing  of  the  in- 
scription that  I  have  seen,  which  shows  it  in  an  even  more 
simple  and  uninstructive  manner.  He  also  produced  many 
paintings,  practically  all  alike  except  that  one  set  exhibited 


154  DIGHTON  ROCK 

spring-time  foliage  and  the  other  that  of  autumn,  and  practi- 
cally all  of  them  duplicates  of  the  lithograph,  including  the 
inscription.  A  painting  by  him  of  the  Landing  of  the  Norse- 
men hangs  on  the  walls  of  the  Old  Colony  Historical  Society. 

26.  Drawings  by  Edward  Seager,  1864.  47  x  72  inches. 
C.S.M.    Plate  XXXVIII,  xx.  342. 

In  1864  Commodore  George  S.  Blake,  Superintendent  of 
the  United  States  Naval  Academy  at  Newport,  presented 
to  the  American  Antiquarian  Society  these  two  drawings, 
which  were  made  by  Edward  Seager,  Professor  of  Drawing 
and  Draughting  at  the  Academy,  assisted  by  the  Rev.  Charles 
R.  Hale,  Chaplain  and  Acting  Assistant  Professor  of  Mathe- 
matics. In  March,  1865,  Commodore  Blake  presented  also  to 
the  society  Mr.  Hale's  Essay  on  the  Dighton  Rock,  bearing  the 
date  January  31st,  1865.  Relative  to  the  drawings,  it  speaks 
of  two  visits  having  been  made,  on  the  first  of  which  the  tide 
was  unfavorable.  "On  a  second  visit,  we  had  ample  time,  and 
every  circumstance  of  light  &c  favoring  us.  From  the  careful 
sketches  taken  by  us,  Mr.  Seager  has  since  made  the  beautiful 
and  elaborate  pencil  and  India  Ink  drawings  laid  before  you." 

One  of  the  drawings  shows  the  rock  and  its  surroundings, 
the  other  the  rock  alone,  with  its  inscription.  Its  particular 
merit  is  the  same  as  that  of  Kendall's  painting  and  engraving, 
of  endeavoring  to  present  the  actual  appearance  of  the  rock  to 
the  eye,  without  emphasis  and  interpretation  of  its  lines,  with 
all  its  actual  faintness  and  uncertainty.  Kendall's,  I  think,  is 
more  successful  in  this  than  Seager's.  But  of  course  a  faithful 
photograph  of  the  unchalked  surface,  better  than  any  that  had 
been  possible  up  to  Seager's  time,  would  be  a  vast  improvement 
over  the  method  employed  by  these  two  men.  The  possessor  of 
a  drawing,  however  faithful,  can  see  the  inscription  in  only  the 
one  way,  as  the  artist  himself  saw  it.  A  perfect  photograph 
enables  its  owner  to  engage  in  repeated  and  protracted  study 
of  the  surface,  to  see  constantly  new  things  in  it,  to  make  his 
own  interpretations  exactly  as  if  he  were  examining  the  rock 
itself.  An  approach  toward  such  a  photograph  was  the  next 
representation  of  the  inscription  to  appear. 

27.  Burgess-Folsom   Photograph,  by  George  C.   Burgess 


REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  INSCRIPTION    155 

and  Augustine  H.  Folsom,  July,  1868.     9  x  13  inches,  and 
stereoscopic.    Figure  23.    C.S.M.    Plate  I,  xviii.  234-235. 

This  was  made  without  first  chalking  the  supposed  charac- 
ters on  the  rock.  In  matters  of  dispute  as  to  what  is  there, 
earlier  depictions  enable  us  to  say  only  that  someone  did  or  did 
not  see  them;  but  this  is  the  first  of  all  depictions  that  makes 
it  possible  to  study  out  the  matter  for  ourselves  and  arrive  at  an 
independent  opinion. 

On  December  24,  1868  and  February  10,  1869,  copies  of 
these  photographs  were  presented  to  the  Massachusetts  His- 
torical Society  by  George  C.  Burgess  of  Dighton.  I  have  seen 
duplicates  of  them  in  the  Gilbert  Museum  at  Amherst  College 
and  in  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society.  The  two  halves 
of  the  stereoscopic  arrangement  are  identical,  instead  of  having 
the  typical  and  desirable  difference  necessary  for  production 
of  the  full  stereoscopic  effect. 

Mr.  Folsom,  a  photographer  of  Roxbury,  wrote  to  me  in 
1916  that  he  still  remembered  the  circumstances  very  distinctly. 
"Mr.  Burgess  had  the  rock  scrubbed  off  with  scrubbing  brush 
and  sea  water  to  remove  the  slime  and  seaweed  that  had  grown 
on  it.  There  was  no  chalking  or  working  it  up  at  the  time  that 
I  remember." 

28.  Davis-Gardner  Stereoscopic  View,  by  Captain  Nathan 
S.  Davis  and  William  B.  Gardner,  1873.  C.S.M.  Plate 
XXXIX,  XX.  352. 

This  photograph  and  the  next  following  caused  me  a  great 
deal  of  uncertainty  and  confusion  for  a  considerable  period, 
which  led  to  much  correspondence  and  investigation  before  the 
facts  were  sifted  out.  Partly  through  positive  and  sometimes 
conflicting  statements  in  the  literature,  partly  through  natural 
inference  from  such  statements,  and  partly  through  hints  and 
rumors  and  facts  communicated  by  correspondents,  I  have  had 
to  entertain  the  possibility  that  photographs  had  been  made  by 
twelve  distinct  persons.  In  the  end,  all  the  facts  and  rumors 
settled  down  into  the  certainty  that  there  were  but  two  occa- 
sions involved,  each  with  its  own  separate  whitening  of  the 
lines  on  the  rock,  and  that  all  the  photographs  in  the  tentative 
list  were  made  from  either  the  one  or  the  other  of  these  two 


156  DIGHTON  ROCK 

interpretations  of  the  lines,  or  through  re-photographing  one 
of  the  photographs  so  produced. 

I  have  seen  but  two  photographs,  both  of  them  stereoscopic, 
made  on  the  earlier  of  the  two  occasions.  One  of  them  is  in 
the  Harvard  College  Library,  the  other  in  the  Rhode  Island 
Historical  Society.  Captain  Nathan  S.  Davis  of  Somerset  has 
furnished  me  with  the  facts  concerning  it : 

I  was  postmaster  of  Somerset  and  much  interested  in  stereo- 
scopic work.  William  B.  Gardner  was  a  travelling  photographer, 
going  with  his  covered  wagon  as  a  darkroom  from  town  to  town 
making  local  views.  We  went  to  the  rock  together  with  the  fixed 
purpose  of  making  the  best  and  most  nearly  perfect  photograph 
of  it  that  could  be  made.  After  washing  the  written  face,  I  found 
that  a  small  pointed  stone  held  like  a  pencil  in  my  fingers  would 
go  to  the  bottom  of  the  lines  cleaning  them  out  and  leaving  a  mark 
behind  much  resembling  chalk.  We  made  several  exposures. 
Gardner  made  photographs  and  mounted  them  on  cards  with  his 
name  on  them.  As  I  had  one  or  more  of  the  original  negatives, 
some  little  later  I  made  prints  and  mounted  them  on  cards  bearing 
my  name.  Somewhere  near  the  time  of  making  this  photograph 
Gardner  moved  his  family  here. 

The  Harvard  copy  bears  on  the  margin  of  the  face  Gard- 
ner's name  with  address  given  as  Sherborn,  Mass.,  and  the 
printed  legend:  "Runic  Inscription  on  Dighton  Rock."  The 
other  lacks  these  features,  but  has  on  the  back  a  long  printed 
description  attributing  the  inscription  to  the  Norsemen,  and  the 
statement :  "As  the  cleavage  was  found  to  run  horizontally,  the 
inscription  could  not  be  split  off  for  removal."  Mr.  Gardner 
moved  from  Sherborn  to  Somerset  sometime  between  April  and 
June  in  1874.  Since  the  printed  matter  on  the  mounts  indi- 
cates that  he  was  still  living  in  Sherborn  when  he  took  it,  and 
since  Davis  confirms  the  fact  that  he  had  not  yet  moved  to 
Somerset,  it  seems  probable  that  it  was  in  1873  that  this  event 
occurred. 

I  know  of  no  former  reproductions  of  this  photograph  in 
the  literature  of  the  rock. 

29.  Harrison-Gardner    Photograph,    by    Captain    A,    M. 


Fig.  23.     By  Gcorgf  C   Burgess  and  Augustiiu-  H.   Folsom.   1868 


Fig.  24.     By   Charles  A.   Hathaway,   Jr.,   1907 
Photographs  of  Dightoii  Rock  without  preliminary  chalking 

Facing  page  156 


REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  INSCRIPTION    157 

Harrison  and  William  B.  Gardner,  about  Septem- 
ber 15,  1875.  Figure  20.  C.S.M.  Plate  XL, 
XX.  362. 

a.  Stereoscopic  View  of  the  rock  alone. 

h.  Stereoscopic  View  including  five  persons. 

c.  8x11  Photograph. 

(/.  4  X  5  copy  from  the  original  by  WilHam  E.  C. 
Deane,  about  1882. 

^.5x8  copy  from  the  original  by  George  M.  Young, 
1890. 

This  was  made  under  direction  of  Captain  A.  M.  Harrison 
of  the  United  States  Coast  Survey,  who  at  the  time  was 
engaged  in  making  a  survey  of  Taunton  River.  I  have  seen 
several  complimentary  copies  signed  by  Harrison  bearing  date 
September  15,  1875;  hence  it  was  taken  shortly  before  that 
date,  unless  the  date  indicates  the  time  of  taking  instead  of  that 
of  presentation.  A  number  of  persons  participated  in  the  proc- 
ess. One  of  them  was  Captain  Harrison  himself,  who  signed 
a  statement  that  has  been  printed  on  many  of  the  cards  on 
which  these  photographs  were  mounted : 

Having  been  present  when  the  above  picture  was  taken,  I  can 
certify  that  no  hieroglyphic  marks  were  "chalked"  which  were  not 
clear  to  the  eye,  (though  too  obscure  to  copy  plainly  upon  the 
negative,)  and  that  special  care  was  taken  to  avoid  making  any  line 
more  distinct  where  there  was  the  least  room  for  doubt.  I  think 
that  there  can  be  no  question  that  there  were  originally  many  more 
characters  cut  upon  the  Rock  than  appear  in  the  photograph,  par- 
ticularly at  the  base,  where  it  has  been  for  centuries  exposed  to  the 
action  of  the  tides. 

In  addition  to  this  statement,  the  printed  matter  on  the  mounts 
included  a  lengthy  exposition  by  Gardner  of  the  Norse  origin 
and  Rafn's  translation,  similar  to  the  one  that  he  used  on  the 
Davis-Gardner  version. 

The  date  of  this  photograph  is  often  given  wrongly  as 
1876.  The  only  copy  of  the  plain  stereoscopic  view  that  I  have 
seen  is  in  the  Harvard  College  Library.  Of  the  other  stereo- 
scopic view  I  know  only  through  a  copy  loaned  to  me  by  Ed- 


158  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ward  F.  Waldron  of  Dighton.  This  shows  five  men  grouped 
about  the  rock,  and  Mr.  Elisha  Slade  informs  me  that,  in  order 
from  left  to  right,  they  are:  "Beoni  Bradbury,  William  B. 
French,  A.  M.  Harrison,  Elisha  Slade,  and  Mr.  Lockwood.  All 
but  myself  were  of  the  U.  S.  Coast  Survey,  Mr.  Harrison  in 
charge  of  the  party.  The  latter  died  in  1880."  It  is  clearly 
from  this  stereoscopic  photograph  that  was  derived  a  small  cut, 
the  source  of  which  long  puzzled  me,  used  by  Ernst  Loffler  in 
his  paper  on  the  Vineland  Excursions.  The  large  photograph 
has  doubtless  been  more  widely  distributed  than  any  other  de- 
piction of  the  inscription.  It  has  been  used  as  the  basis  of 
illustrations  by  T.  W.  Higginson,  1882 ;  Old  Colony  Historical 
Society  (in  a  leaflet  on  the  rock,  after  Higginson) ;  George  A. 
Shove,  1883;  F.  S.  Drake,  1885;  Baxter,  1889;  William  A. 
Slade,  1898;  Harper's  Encyclop<2dia  of  United  States  History, 
1901 ;  E.  Hitchcock,  1904;  K.  M.  Abbott,  1904;  Avery,  1904. 

The  large  Harrison-Gardner  photograph  was  itself  photo- 
graphed, in  4  by  5  size,  probably  at  some  time  between  1882 
and  1884,  by  William  E.  C.  Deane,  of  Taunton.  I  have  a  letter 
from  him  in  which  he  says :  "I  borrowed  a  picture  from  Capt. 
Davis,  copied  it,  and  sold  the  pictures  at  Dighton  Rock  Park." 
The  mounts  bore  a  statement  about  its  runic  character,  similar 
to  that  used  by  Gardner,  The  Peoria  Public  Library  has  an- 
other copy  of  this  photograph,  made  by  the  late  George  M. 
Young  of  Boston  in  1890,  on  a  5  by  8  plate. 

30.  Plaster  Cast  by  Lucien  I.  Blake,  1876.  Figure  19. 
C.S.M.    Plate  XLI,  xx.  372. 

Concerning  this,  which  is  now  in  the  Gilbert  Museum  at 
Amherst  College,  the  late  Professor  Blake  wrote  to  me  in  1916 : 

I  took  the  plaster  cast  of  the  rock  myself  in  the  summer  of 
1876,  when  I  was  a  Junior  in  Amherst  College.  I  was  assisted 
by  Louis  B.  Dean  of  Taunton,  then  a  Sophomore  at  Harvard,  since 
deceased.  We  rowed  down  the  river  from  Taunton  with  a  barrel 
of  plaster  of  Paris  and  took  the  cast  at  four  o'clock  one  morning, 
when  the  tide  was  out,  after  cleaning  and  oiling  the  face  of  the 
rock.  We  had  to  take  seven  sectional  plates  to  get  the  whole  sur- 
face. From  these  reliefs,  I  made  afterwards  the  cast  now  at  Am- 
herst. 


REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  INSCRIPTION    159 

I  remember  suggesting  that  the  rock  be  taken  up  bodily  and 
put  in  some  museum.  I  then  found  that  it  is  not  a  boulder,  but  an 
exposed  part  of  a  ledge,  and  there  were  no  funds  available  for  such 
expensive  work  as  slicing  ofif  a  ledge. 

A  photograph  of  the  cast  was  taken  in  February,  1894,  and 
is  preserved  in  the  manuscript  catalogue  of  the  Gilbert  Museum. 
It  is  this  which  is  reproduced  in  our  plate.  The  general  sur- 
face of  the  cast  has  been  colored  a  uniform  slate  or  drab,  and  on 
it  the  prominent  lines  have  been  emphasized  by  means  of  a 
bluish  paint. 

31.  Photograph  by  Frank  S.  Davis,  September  11,  1893. 
C.S.M.    Plate  XLII,  xx.  382. 

The  date  is  marked  on  the  rock.    See  number  33. 

32.  Photograph  by  Frank  S.  Davis,  January  27,  1894. 
C.S.M.    Plate  XLII,  xx.  382. 

The  date  is  marked  on  a  wooden  slab  placed  by  the  side  of 
the  rock.    See  number  33. 

33.  Photograph  by  Frank  S.  Davis,  early  in  1894.  Figure 
21.    C.S.M.    Plate  XLIII,  xx.  392. 

This  is  another  photograph  whose  authorship  was  difficult 
to  discover.  I  found  it  reproduced  as  an  illustration  to  Cyrus 
Thomas's  account  of  Dighton  Rock  in  Hodge's  Handbook  of 
American  Indians,  1907,  and  again  accompanying  a  paper 
describing  the  rock  by  William  H.  Holmes  in  1916.  Mr.  Davis, 
who  now  lives  in  Florida,  wrote  to  me  all  that  he  could  remem- 
ber about  thcss  three  photographs : 

Going  back  to  my  school  days,  I  can  remember  going  to  the 
rock  and  taking  chalk  and  marking  in  the  lines.  There  would  be 
a  number  of  us  and  we  would  all  work  at  it  and  talk  about  what 
they  were  put  there  for.  Then  in  after  years  I  got  a  camera  and 
got  quite  interested  in  taking  pictures.  One  of  the  photographs  I 
made  for  some  one  who  was  writing  a  book  at  that  time,  but  can- 
not remember  the  name  of  the  writer  or  that  of  the  book.^  I 
expect  that  I  marked  quite  a  few  lines  on  the  rock  which  were 
never  put  on  by  the  maker ;  also  that  there  were  quite  a  few  marks 
put  on  by  the  maker  which  I  did  not  mark  in. 

1  It  may  have  been  C.  Thomas's  account  of  the  rock  in  Hodge's  Hand- 
book. 


160  DIGHTON  ROCK 

The  three  photographs  here  listed  are  given  separate  num- 
bers because  they  show  separate  chalkings.  The  first  of  them 
exists  in  two  varieties,  the  one  taken  from  a  nearer  point  than 
the  other.  The  last  has  three  varieties :  the  one  that  has  been 
published  in  the  two  cases  mentioned  above ;  a  similar  one  taken 
from  a  slightly  different  position;  and  a  third,  the  one  here 
reproduced,  taken  after  a  few  further  chalk-marks  had  been 
added  to  the  rock. 

34.  Post-Card  issued  by  Charles  W.  Chace,  about  1900. 
C.S.M.    Plate  XLIII,  xx.  392. 

Mr.  Chace,  who  was  born  in  Dighton,  has  long  had  these 
postal  cards  for  sale  at  his  place  of  business  in  Taunton.  Since 
about  1905,  they  have  been  issued  in  colors.  Concerning  the 
photograph  from  which  they  were  made,  he  can  tell  me  only 
that  it  was  made  "about  fifteen  years  ago  by  a  young  man  who 
worked  in  a  wheelwright  shop  at  Westville;  but  he  left  for 
parts  unknown  several  years  ago." 

35.  Old  Colony  Historical  Society's  Photograph,  June, 
1902.    Figure  22.    C.S.M.    Plate  XLIV,  xx.  402. 

The  late  James  E.  Seaver,  secretary  of  the  society,  informed 
me  that  this  was  taken  under  his  supervision  in  June,  1902.  In 
preparation  for  it  the  rock  was  first  carefully  cleaned  and 
chalked.  The  photographer  was  A.  L.  Ward  of  Taunton.  Mr. 
Seaver  had  invited  a  number  of  men  to  be  present  and  assist 
him  in  the  selection  of  the  lines  to  be  chalked.  Two  photo- 
graphs were  taken,  one  of  the  rock  alone,  the  other  showing  the 
persons  who  were  present.  These  persons,  in  order  from  left 
to  right,  he  named  as  Joshua  E.  Crane,  librarian,  of  Taunton; 
John  O.  Babbitt  of  Dighton;  William  MacDonald,  Professor 
of  History  at  Brown  University;  James  E.  Seaver;  Ralph 
Davol  of  Taunton;  Professor  Crosby  of  Harvard  (whom  I 
cannot  identify)  ;  Mr.  Negus  of  Dighton;  C.  A.  Agard  of  New 
Bedford. 

The  photograph  has  been  reproduced  in  the  Providence 
Journal,  July  15,  1912;  and  in  the  report  of  the  Dighton  Bi- 
centennial Celebration,  July  17,  1912. 

36.  Drawing  of  the  Shoreward  Side  of  the  Rock  and  its 


REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  INSCRIPTION    161 

Markings,  by  Charles  A.  Fernald,  1903.     Figure  17.    C.S.M. 
Figure  5,  xx.  366. 

This  is  the  date  of  Fernald's  visit  to  Assonet  Neck,  accord- 
ing to  the  person  at  whose  house  he  passed  the  night.  The 
drawing  was  published  in  the  Fernald  Genealogy. 

The  initials  cut  upon  this  shoreward  slope  are  all  very 
faint  and  apparently  old,  so  obscure  that  most  of  them  are 
rarely  clearly  visible,  and  almost  all  of  them  susceptible  of 
being  interpreted  in  varying  ways  under  different  conditions  of 
lighting  or  different  mental  attitudes  toward  them.  Of  thir- 
teen sets  of  them  that  I  have  found,  I  am  uncertain  of  the 
correct  reading  in  all  cases  but  one.  Most  of  my  readings  dif- 
fer from  Fernald's;  and  the  names  and  characters  that  he  de- 
picts, other  than  initials,  I  am  sure  are  purely  imaginary. 

27.    Photograph  by  Charles  R.  Tucker,  August,  1903. 
C.S.M.    Plate  XLV,  xx.  412. 

This  is  a  small  amateur  photograph,  with  conservative 
chalking,  concerning  which  its  maker,  of  New  Dorp,  New 
York,  writes  me:  "The  characters  were  not  plain  and  I  was 
careful  not  to  chalk  any  that  I  could  not  readily  see." 

38.  Photograph  by  Carlton  Grinnell,  about  1907.  C.S.M. 
Plate  XLV,  xx.  412. 

This  is  another  small  amateur  photograph,  presented  to  me 
by  Edward  F.  Waldron  of  Dighton,  a  cousin  of  the  maker.  I 
know  nothing  further  about  it. 

39.  Photograph  by  Charles  A.  Hathaway,  Jr.,  July,  1907. 
Figure  24.    C.S.M.    Plate  XXXII,  xx.  frontispiece. 

The  original  is  an  8  by  10  negative,  taken  under  excellent 
conditions  of  lighting  and  expert  manipulation.  It  has  the  ex- 
ceptional merit  of  showing  the  rock  as  it  actually  is,  without  any 
kind  of  artificial  emphasis  of  the  lines  upon  it.  Mr.  Hathaway 
is  a  teacher  of  science  in  the  Taunton  High  School.  Concern- 
ing its  production,  Mr.  Hathaway  informs  me : 

I  believe  I  made  that  particular  negative  with  a  CoUinear  anas- 
tigmatic  lens  of  about  8  inch  focus.  Of  course  almost  any  good 
lens  would  give  a  sharp  negative.  The  peculiar  lighting  is  what  is 
important.  I  chose  the  time  of  day  and  year  that  I  thought  best 
adapted  to  my  attempt.    It  was  in  July,  and  during  the  late  fore- 


162  DIGHTON  ROCK 

noon,  as  nearly  as  I  can  tell  at  the  present  time.  I  wished  to  show 
the  characters  without  any  chalk  marks.  The  sediment  in  the 
grooves  and  cracks  was  not  disturbed,  and  aided  in  bringing  out 
the  surface  inequalities.  I  washed  off  and  brushed  off  the  growth 
of  algae  on  the  very  base  of  the  surface. 

40.  Eddy  Photograph,  by  William  P.  Eddy  and  Frank  N. 
Ganong,  August,  1908.    C.S.M.    Plate  XLVI,  xx.  422. 

Mr.  Eddy  is  owner  of  the  Eddy  House  in  Dighton,  and 
secured  this  3j4  by  4^  photograph  for  use  in  his  prospectus. 
The  photographic  work  was  done  by  Mr.  Ganong,  a  profes- 
sional photographer,  then  living  in  Cambridge.  Mr.  Eddy 
himself  did  all  the  work  of  cleaning  and  chalking  the  rock. 

41.  Post-Card  by  G.  K.  Wilbur,  1913.  C.S.M.  Plate 
XLVI,  XX.  422. 

Mr.  Wilbur  was  manager  of  Dighton  Rock  Park,  which  is 
not  at  the  rock  itself,  but  across  the  river,  below  Dighton  vil- 
lage. The  negative  was  made  for  him  in  the  fall  of  1913,  by 
a  photographer  Aj/hose  name  he  does  not  recall,  and  the  lines 
on  the  rock  were  marked  not  with  chalk  but  with  plaster  of 
Paris.  The  post-cards,  of  which  there  are  two,  differing  only 
in  size,  are  in  colors,  and  were  produced  in  Germany.  The 
same  picture,  uncolored,  is  printed  at  the  head  of  the  pro- 
spectus of  the  Park,  which  endorses  without  qualification  the 
Norse  claim  for  the  rock. 

42.  Photograph  by  Charles  W.  Brown,  May  15,  1915. 
Reproduced  in  Old-Time  Neiv  England,  October,  1923, 
frontispiece. 

Mr.  Brown  is  Professor  of  Geology  in  Brown  University. 
His  photograph  was  taken  without  chalking,  and,  being  from  an 
unusual  angle,  caught  a  lighting  which  shows  some  characters 
more  clearly  than  they  appear  in  any  other  photograph. 

43.  Photographs  and  Sketches  by  E.  B.  Delabarre,  1919 
to  1927: 

a.  Flashlight  photograph.  Copyright  1920,  July  17, 
1920,  3:00  A.M.     Figure  25. 

h.  Other  photographs,  sketches  and  drawings. 

c.  Complete  Conjectural  Reconstruction  of  the  In- 
scriptions on  Dighton  Rock,  1927.    Figure  35. 


fe 


REPRODUCTIONS  OF  THE  INSCRIPTION    163 

I  have  made  more  than  a  hundred  photographs,  under  vari- 
ous conditions,  and  a  number  of  sketches  interpreting  the  in- 
scription. Some  of  them  have  been  given  in  earher  pubhca- 
tions  and  in  this  volume.  Only  one  or  two  of  the  photographs 
are  of  unique  value  and  deserving  of  particular  description. 

The  best  device  for  bringing  out  in  strong  relief  every  de- 
tail of  texture,  every  varying  elevation  and  depression,  and 
thus  every  line  that  has  been  graved  so  as  to  lie  more  or  less 
below  the  general  level,  is  that  known  as  shadow-lighting.  The 
source  of  illumination  must  be  almost  in  the  plane  of  the  sur- 
face, only  a  little  elevated  above  it,  with  the  result  that  the  light 
glances  close  along  the  surface  and  leaves  deep  shadows  in  all 
of  the  depressions.  Sunlight  never  does  this  perfectly  for 
Dighton  Rock.  Moreover,  since  the  rock's  face  inclines  at  an 
angle  of  39  degrees  to  the  vertical,  it  is  impossible,  by  the  use 
of  a  camera  resting  upon  an  ordinary  tripod,  to  focus  all  parts 
of  it  with  equally  perfect  definition,  or  to  represent  exact  shapes 
and  proportions  without  perspective  distortion.  For  best  re- 
sults the  camera  must  be  elevated  to  such  a  height  that  it  can 
be  pointed  down  in  a  direction  perpendicular  to  the  face,  there 
must  be  no  diffused  daylight  present  to  light  up  the  hollows, 
and  the  illumination  must  be  artificial.  These  conditions  were 
satisfied  in  a  photograph  which  I  took  at  three  o'clock  in  the 
night  on  July  17,  1920.  It  was  made  on  a  5  by  7  plate  with  a 
good  lens,  the  camera  mounted  on  a  trestle  at  a  height  of  eleven 
and  a  half  feet  and  pointing  downward  at  an  angle  of  51  de- 
grees in  a  line  perpendicular  to  the  centre  of  the  inscribed  face, 
so  that  the  sensitive  plate  was  parallel  to  the  plane  of  the  sur- 
face photographed  (Figure  26).  This  insured  a  result  in 
which  shapes  and  proportions  and  relative  positions  were  cor- 
rectly represented.  The  rock  was  then  lighted  by  strong  flash- 
lights, one  at  each  end.  The  two  lights  were  necessary,  not 
only  to  secure  equal  illumination  at  both  ends,  but  also  because 
the  face  is  considerably  rounded  horizontally,  and  the  middle 
of  it  thus  bulges  out  so  much  that  effective  shadow-illumination 
cannot  be  secured  from  one  side  alone.  The  resulting  photo- 
graph (Figure  25)  is  by  far  the  best  one  ever  secured,  full  of 
minute  and  exact  detail,  equally  focussed  for  all  parts  of  the 


164  DIGHTON  ROCK 

surface,  properly  proportioned,  and  thus  a  secure  basis  for 
fruitful  study.  It  does  not,  however,  dispense  with  the  need 
of  consulting  other  photographs  also.  No  single  moment  and 
manner  of  illumination,  hence  no  single  photograph,  can  pos- 
sibly make  visible  all  discoverable  details.  I  have  made  many 
by  daylight,  at  different  hours  and  from  differing  positions,  and 
many  by  flashlight  with  various  directions  and  angles  of  light- 
ing and  sighting.  A  few  of  these,  and  those  previously  men- 
tioned as  due  to  Burgess,  Blake,  Hathaway,  and  Brown  have 
been  helpful  as  supplementary  material  for  study.  Some  of 
the  characters  and  figures  on  the  rock  stand  out  with  especial 
clearness  under  particular  other  conditions  than  those  of  my 
best  flashlight  production,  such  as  a  peculiar  incidence  of  day- 
light, a  particular  angle  and  distance  in  the  position  of  the 
camera,  a  focussing  less  exact  which  catches  the  reflections  of 
light  rather  than  the  minute  texture  of  the  stone.  Partial  ex- 
amples, therefore,  will  be  used  from  several  of  these  supple- 
mentary sources  in  our  later  discussion;  but  main  reliance  will 
be  placed  upon  the  doubly-lighted  flashlight  of  1920. 


Fig.  26.    Arrangement  of  apparatus  for  taking  flashlight  photographs 


Fig.  29.     The   Coat-of-Arms  of   Portugal 

a.  As  adopted  in  1485 

b.  As  depicted  ou  the  Cantino  chart,   1502 
(".     As  inscribed  on   Dighton  Rock 


I'uriiHi  l^ac/c  164 


CHAPTER  X 

A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  OF  THE  RECORDS 

We  cannot  be  far  wrong  in  asserting  that  rarely  if  ever  has 
any  human  document  given  rise  to  richer  fancy  or  more  varied 
controversy  than  has  Dighton  Rock.    For  more  than  two  hun- 
dred years  learned  men  have  been  disputing  about  its  writings, 
and  are  never  satisfied  with  the  proposed  solutions.  ^  Almost 
every  theory  about  its  origin  and  meaning  that  human  ingenuity 
could  devise  has  had  its  advocates.     A  score  of  conflicting 
translations  have  been  offered,  and  double  that  number  of  sug- 
gestions as  to  who  may  have  been  its  probable  authors.     In- 
habitants of  Atlantis,  lost  tribes  of  Israel,  Egyptians,  Libyans, 
Phoenicians,  Scythians,  Chinese,  Romans,  Norsemen,  Druids, 
Catholic  missionaries,  pirates,  and  even  pre-glacial  men  have  all 
been  summoned  from  the  past  to  claim  its  writings  as  their 
own.    Not  one  of  the  theories  has  succeeded  in  arousing  gen- 
eral confidence.    Even  the  most  popular  and  hotly  defended  be- 
lief of  all— the  Norse  theory— has  not  had  a  single  advocate 
among  serious  scholars  for  more  than  fifty  years,  and  is  cer- 
tainly wrong.    Aside  from  the  natural  assumption  that  Indians 
alone  were  responsible,  the  theories  have  rested  solely  upon 
fanciful  and  sometimes  romantically  appealing  but  never  proven 
beliefs  that  some  man  or  race  of  men  may  possibly  have  reached 
the  locality,  and  upon  accepting  some  undependable  version  of 
the   rock's    artificial   characters    as    sure   and   reliable.      New 
methods  of  study  have  now  made  it  possible  to  end  these  futile 
speculations,  and  it  testifies  no  longer  in  fancy  to  fabled  adven- 
tures of  long  ago,  but  rather  in  reality  to  incidents  that  fall 
within  the  range  of  recorded  history. 

One  great  difficulty  in  arriving  at  agreement  has  been  that 
no  one,  by  study  of  the  rock  itself,  can  tell  with  any  satisfying 
degree  of  certainty  what  was  actually  graven  on  its  surface. 

165 


166  DIGHTON  ROCK 

The  tides  leave  it  exposed  for  too  short  a  period  at  a  time  to 
permit  satisfactory  examination;  illumination  is  never  at  its 
best  for  all  parts  of  the  surface  at  once;  most  of  the  lines  are 
so  shallow,  so  identical  in  coloring  with  the  rest  of  the  surface 
and  so  intermingled  with  the  irregularities  of  the  rock's  own 
texture,  wear,  and  decay,  that  it  is  impossible  to  see  them  clearly 
and  to  distinguish  the  artificial  from  the  natural  ones.  Only  a 
few  of  the  pictographs  are  unquestionable.  A  large  human 
figure  midway  between  centre  and  left  end,  two  smaller  ones  at 
extreme  right,  two  complex  figures  made  up  of  triangular 
forms  at  the  top,  and  a  peculiar  quadruped  with  horns,  near  the 
centre,  are  about  all  that  nearly  everyone  sees  alike.  The  Ken- 
dall and  Seager  drawings  exhibit  this  fact  admirably,  being 
deliberately  intended  to  present  only  so  much  as  is  clearly  evi- 
dent. There  has  been  great  diversity  in  seeing  everything 
except  these  few  common  features.  It  is  evident  that  no  two 
persons  who  study  the  surface,  and  even  no  single  person  who 
studies  it  at  different  times,  can  agree  about  what  is  there.  The 
various  drawings  have  a  certain  value  for  suggesting  what  to 
look  for,  but  otherwise  are  almost  worthless,  since  each  repre- 
sents only  one  person's  way  of  interpreting  the  probabilities  as 
they  appeal  to  him  on  one  occasion,  and  no  one  else  can  rightly 
feel  any  confidence  that  they  help  him  to  a  knowledge  of  what 
most  of  the  lines  and  characters  and  pictures  actually  are.  A 
good  photograph  should  remedy  the  difficulty.  With  very  few 
exceptions,  however,  the  photographs  suffer  from  the  same 
defect  as  that  of  the  drawings.  In  order  to  secure  a  clear 
picture,  the  supposed  lines  of  the  inscription  are  usually  first 
marked  with  chalk,  and  these  selected  lines  give  only  the 
untrustworthy  individual  rendering.  Although  the  earliest 
daguerreotype  that  we  have,  the  one  made  by  Captain  Seth 
Eastman  in  1853,  has  this  defect,  yet  the  focussing  was  so 
unusually  good  for  a  case  where  chalking  was  resorted  to  that 
much  unmarked  detail  is  visible,  and  we  can  compare  it  with 
later  productions  in  order  to  determine  whether  there  has  been 
wear  or  other  change  within  the  last  seventy  years.  Aside  from 
such  minor  services,  the  photographs  from  chalkings  are  no 
better  than  the  drawings,  merely  increasing  the  confusion  and 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  167 

uncertainty  as  to  what  is  actually  there.  They  prove  clearly 
that  it  is  hopeless  to  study  the  rock  itself  to  discover  what  is 
recorded  upon  it.  The  only  possibility  of  success  must  depend 
upon  securing  a  photograph  unspoiled  by  previous  chalkings, 
under  conditions  that  will  reproduce  the  rock's  surface  faith- 
fully and  exactly,  and  permit  later  minute  and  prolonged  exam- 
ination, not  of  the  rock  itself  but  of  the  unprejudiced  photo- 
graph of  it. 

The  only  useful  photographs  known  to  me  earlier  than  my 
own  which  are  free  from  chalked  lines  and  show  the  rock  just 
as  it  appears,  are  those  by  Burgess,  1868  (Figure  23),  by 
Hathaway,  1907  (Figure  24),  and  by  Brown,  1915  (Figure 
27)  ;  although  the  photograph  of  the  Blake  cast,  1876  (Figure 
19),  is  also  somewhat  helpful.  They  show  about  all  that  any- 
one could  see  by  examination  of  the  rock  itself,  by  daylight 
illumination.  They  are  preferable  to  the  unreliable  drawings 
and  chalkings,  for  they  permit  us  to  examine  the  surface  for 
ourselves  without  prejudice;  and  each  of  them  settles  con- 
clusively the  nature  of  some  limited  portions  of  the  inscription. 
But  none  of  them  gives  a  satisfying  view  of  the  whole.  They 
are  tantalizing  in  leaving  only  vaguely  hinted  at  so  much  that 
must  be  there.  They  leave  us,  therefore,  still  baffled,  and  we 
must  conclude  that  daylight  illumination  is  inadequate  for  exact 
and  complete  portrayal  of  the  indentations  of  the  surface.  My 
own  flashlight  photographs,  without  perspective  distortion,  are 
naturally  the  most  serviceable  of  all.  They  do  not,  however, 
dispense  with  the  need  of  consulting  other  photographs  also. 
No  single  moment  and  manner  of  illumination,  hence  no  single 
photograph,  can  possibly  make  visible  all  discoverable  details. 
So  all  of  those  here  mentioned  can  be  helpful  in  arriving  at  de- 
cisions. In  fact,  it  is  much  more  profitable  to  study  them  than 
to  seek  at  the  rock  itself  for  the  dim  message  that  it  bears.  The 
writer  has  spent  many  hours  at  many  different  times  in  study- 
ing it  in  place,  but  has  never  yet  detected  on  it  a  single  new  and 
certain  feature. 

It  requires  hours,  and  days,  and  months  of  prolonged  and 
microscopic  study  to  arrive  at  a  well-founded  decision  as  to 
what  these  photographs  reveal.    So  far  as  I  can  read  them,  the 


168  DIGHTON  ROCK 

whole  inscription  (Figure  35)  is  a  confused  maze  of  lines, 
figures,  pictographs,  scribblings,  words,  initials,  names,  dates, 
covering  almost  the  entire  surface,  intricately  intermingling  and 
in  some  cases  covering  one  another.  Among  them  I  find  a  con- 
siderable number  of  pictographs  and  records  that  no  one  has 
ever  observed  before. 

The  first  independent  discovery  that  I  made  for  myself,  by 
aid  of  this  new  battery  of  photographs,  was  of  the  date  "1511" 
(  Figure  33  ) .  Almost  everyone  else,  neglecting  the  lower  curve 
of  the  5  and  adding  the  circles  resembling  sun-symbols  just 
above  and  below  the  51,  had  seen  this  as  a  small  human  figure. 
Once  seen  as  a  date,  with  Indian  pictographs  drawn  over  and 
around  it,  it  is  unmistakable.  There  soon  followed  the  dis- 
covery of  a  number  of  other  figures :  the  two  Indians  with 
joined  hands,  the  turtle,  the  date  1825,  a  second  deer,  and  cer- 
tain words  and  numerals  to  whose  examination  we  shall  return 
later.  The  most  important  of  these  new  readings  are  exhibited 
in  the  Figures  numbered  27,  28,  32,  33,  and  34.  Each  of  these 
plates  presents  an  enlargement  of  some  portion  of  one  of  my 
flashlight  photographs  on  which  I  have  drawn  in  ink  the  records 
as  I  see  them,  and  above  it  is  placed  the  same  portion  of  the 
same  photograph  left  untouched,  in  order  that  the  reader  may 
compare  the  two  and  test  for  himself  the  validity  of  the  in- 
terpretation. I  make  no  claim  that  complete  certainty  attaches 
to  most  of  the  readings  suggested.  A  few  of  them  are  sure, 
and  all  of  them  are  not  only  plausible,  but  are  even  highly  prob- 
able and  fit  the  markings  on  the  rock  very  much  better  than  do 
any  of  the  ways  of  depicting  them  that  appear  on  earlier  draw- 
ings and  chalkings.  Why  they  have  never  been  deciphered  in 
this  manner  before  is  a  question  that  we  shall  take  up  for  ex- 
amination shortly. 

It  is  safe  to  say  that  there  is  hardly  any  likelihood  that  any 
one  of  these  discoveries — dates,  names,  deer,  turtle,  numerals, 
Indians — would  ever  have  been  made  by  examination  of  the 
rock  itself,  or  could  have  come  to  light  in  any  other  way  than 
by  prolonged  and  repeated  studies  of  the  photographs.  That 
every  one  of  the  new  features  constitutes  a  plausible,  and  in 
some  cases  unquestionable  reading,  however,  anyone  can  con- 


II  By   Burgess  ami   Fulsom,   186«   (sec   Fig   23) 

/'.  By  Lucien  I.  Blake,  1876  (sec  Fig.  19) 

'■  By  C.  A.  Hathaway,  Jr.,  1907   (sec  Fig    24) 

('.  By  Charles  W.  Brown,   May   l.\  1915  ^ 


I'ig.   11.     The    "Cortereal"'   inscription  on   1  Jighton    Rock,    1511 


.-.  By  F:.   15.  Delabarre,  July  10,  1920.     (Daylight  ) 

/.  By  E.  B.  Delabarre,  July  17,  1920  (Flashlight) 

(I.  The  prolialilv  correct  reading 

/(.  By  E.  B.  Delabarre  (June  19,  1925  ) 


l^i'lt^u-rii   /'(i(/,\v    lOfi-IftQ 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  169 

vince  himself  by  careful  study  of  the  flashlight  photograph  by 
aid  of  a  magnifying  glass,  especially  if  he  will  compare  it  with 
the  earlier  photographs  without  chalking,  and  with  the  Eastman 
daguerreotype.  Some  lines  may  be  indistinct  or  invisible  in 
one  or  another  of  the  earlier  depictions,  because  these  are  less 
perfect  in  definition,  less  searching  in  illumination,  and  one  of 
them  conceals  real  features  by  mistaken  chalkings ;  but  enough 
is  discoverable  in  them  to  prove  that  the  new-found  items  have 
been  existent  for  seventy  years  at  least  and  are  not  of  recent 
introduction  or  merely  imagined. 

There  are  two  lines  of  characters  near  the  middle  of  the  in- 
scribed surface  that  seem  almost  certainly  to  be  alphabetic,  but 
are  so  worn  as  to  be  difficult  to  read.  Rafn  and  his  followers 
once  thought  that  Thorfinn's  name  was  engraved  there,  and 
many  alternative  readings  have  been  advocated.  The  discovery 
of  the  date  1511  led  me  to  reflect  upon  the  early  explorers  who 
might  by  any  possibility  have  been  in  this  vicinity  at  that  time. 
The  first  known  visit  to  Narragansett  Bay  was  by  Verrazano 
in  1524.  It  soon  became  evident  that  none  of  the  known  ex- 
plorers could  have  been  here  in  1511,  except  one  of  the  two 
Cortereals,  Caspar  and  Miguel.  There  could  have  been  un- 
recorded visits  by  others,  for  the  Banks  fisheries  were  already 
in  vigorous  operation,  and  some  of  those  who  pursued  them 
might  have  wandered  farther  than  we  know.  But  of  men 
known  to  have  been  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic  by  1511,  the 
two  Cortereals  are  the  only  ones  who  could  possibly  have  been 
responsible  for  our  inscription.  In  their  case,  it  was  entirely 
possible.  Caspar  had  explored  Newfoundland  and  Labrador 
in  1501,  Miguel  in  the  following  year,  and  both  had  unaccount- 
ably disappeared.  Either  one  of  them  might  have  journeyed 
to  this  place  for  some  unknown  reason,  and  been  unable  to 
return.  With  this  in  mind,  fresh  examination  of  these  obscure 
characters  made  it  clear  that  they  could  easily  be  read  as  the 
name  "Miguel  Cortereal,''  and  that  no  other  definite  reading 
could  plausibly  be  made  out  of  them. 

The  entire  name  is  not  clear  and  certain,  and  many  will 
doubtless  find  it  difficult  to  accept  it  as  valid.  Yet  it  is  even 
more  difficult  not  to  accept  it.     The  strongest  assertion  that  I 


170  DIGHTON  ROCK 

am  willing  to  make  is  that  the  name  is  almost  surely  there,  and 
that  numerous  items  of  indirect  evidence  that  we  shall  soon 
examine  increase  the  probability  of  its  presence  to  such  a  degree 
as  to  justify  a  strong  conviction  that  the  record  was  really 
carved  by  Miguel  Cortereal  in  1511.  At  any  rate,  whatever 
doubts  and  reservations  may  linger  in  any  one's  mind,  it  is 
beyond  dispute  that  this  reading  is  the  only  one  ever  suggested 
that  fits  the  visible  marks  on  the  rock  with  any  degree  of  exact- 
ness, and  no  known  facts  or  sound  arguments  offer  the  least 
difficulty  in  the  way  of  a  belief  in  its  truth. 

Figure  27  is  designed  to  assist  the  reader  in  arriving  at  his 
own  conclusions.  In  it,  this  critical  portion  of  the  rock's  sur- 
face is  presented  as  it  appears  in  every  photograph  of  value  for 
the  purpose,  each  enlarged  to  a  size  that  makes  it  easy  to  ex- 
amine ;  and  my  own  manner  of  reading  the  record  is  indicated 
by  ink-lines  drawn  upon  a  repetition  of  one  of  my  flashlight 
pictures.  Besides  these,  the  Eastman  photograph  (Figure  16), 
alone  among  all  those  made  from  chalkings,  may  render  some 
service  in  arriving  at  a  decision. 

The  first  thing  to  notice  is  that  two  prominent  neighboring 
shapes  resembling  an  X  and  a  V  near  the  end  of  the  lower  line 
are  certainly  not  a  part  of  the  original  inscription,  but  were 
added  later  and  interpolated  over  it,  obscuring  some  of  its 
characters.  This  is  not  very  apparent  in  the  earliest  photo- 
graphs, but  it  is  easily  suggested  in  number  3  and  proven  by 
numbers  5  and  6.  It  is  uncertain  what  the  X  signified  to  those 
who  thus  inserted  it  over  the  lines  of  an  earlier  inscription,  al- 
though in  a  later  figure  (No.  35)  I  have  suggested  one  possi- 
bility. The  V  constitutes  a  pair  of  horns  belonging  to  the  deer 
underneath  this  line  of  letters. 

Disregarding  the  XV,  therefore,  and  a  few  other  marks 
which  the  later  Plate  just  referred  to  indicates  as  interpolations, 
one  may  quickly  convince  himself  that  the  letters  MIGV  .  . 
CORTER  .  .  .  are  present  beyond  question.  Some  of  them 
show  most  clearly  in  some  of  the  photographs,  others  in  others. 
The  remaining  letters  are  very  obscure.  The  second  E  and  the 
L  of  "Cortereal"  are  defaced  by  the  overlying  Indian  glyphs. 
The  EL  of  "Miguel,"  and  the  A  below  them,  are  probably 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  171 

almost  worn  away  by  attrition,  since  they  are  situated  on  that 
part  of  the  sHghtly  curving  face  of  the  rock  which  projects  most 
forward  and  is  thus  subjected  to  the  greatest  amount  of  rub- 
bing by  ice  and  wave.  But  if  we  look  with  minute  care,  not 
always  for  clearly  and  deeply  incised  lines,  but  in  some  cases  for 
series  of  dots  pecked  lightly  in,  we  can  find  faint  yet  satisfac- 
tory traces  of  every  one  of  the  letters.  These  five  letters  last 
mentioned  are  not  very  convincing  on  their  own  evidence  alone. 
But  with  the  other  ten  practically  beyond  question,  and  the 
assumption  of  these  five  consistent  with  such  dim  indications  as 
the  rock  affords,  there  is  little  ground  for  hesitancy  in  accept- 
ing the  entire  name. 

Almost  sure,  but  not  quite,  is,  after  all,  the  best  that  we  can 
say  on  the  evidence  from  the  rock  itself ;  plausible,  yet  not  fully 
certain.  The  rock  itself,  and  photographs  from  it,  do  not  tell 
its  story  unambiguously.  It  would  have  been  read  correctly 
long  ago,  if  it  did.  There  are  numerous  other  considerations, 
however,  which  increase  the  probability  very  much.  One  strong 
item  of  this  indirect  evidence  is  the  character  of  the  letters  and 
numerals  employed.  These  are  appropriate  to  the  period  when 
they  were  written.  It  was  a  time  of  transition  between  the  use 
of  Gothic  and  of  Roman  forms  in  lettering,  and  their  inter- 
mingling, as  in  this  inscription,  was  customary.  It  even  hap- 
pens that  in  the  same  phrase  various  forms  of  the  same  letter 
occur.  Two  maps  discussed  on  page  217  of  Henry  Harrisse's 
Discovery  of  America  use  a  5  of  almost  the  same  peculiar  shape 
as  that  of  our  date,  in  their  own  dates  1524  and  1527.  Abun- 
dant instances  of  the  use  of  angular  C  and  O  and  of  curved  E 
may  be  seen,  or  will  be  found  described,  in  Rafn's  Antiquitates 
AmericancF  on  page  379,  in  Engel  and  Serrure's  Traite  du  Nu- 
mismatiqtie  dii  Moyen  Age  on  1350  and  later  pages  of  volume 
three — in  one  case  three  forms  of  E  appear  on  one  coin — and 
in  number  42  of  Conrad  Haebler's  Typographic  Iberique  du 
Quinzieme  Siecle.  The  use  of  such  letters  is  strongly  con- 
firmatory of  the  validity  of  our  reading.  Even  the  insertion  of 
what  to  us  is  a  lower-case  A,  though  unexpected  and  without 
precedent  so  far  as  we  have  discovered,  is  accordant  enough 
with  the  variable  usage  of  the  time. 


172  DIGHTON  ROCK 

It  is  true  that  there  exists  a  Portuguese  inscription  made  in 
1482  on  the  Congo  river/  whose  writing  is  practically  all  in 
lower  case  letters,  and  very  different  in  appearance  from  this. 
A  reviewer  in  the  Geographical  Journal  for  1923  thinks  that 
this  fact  is  a  reason  why  we  should  regard  the  style  of  our  own 
supposed  lettering  as  "not  altogether  such  as  we  should  expect 
in  an  inscription  of  the  date  in  question."  Nevertheless,  general 
usage  was  very  variable,  and  there  is  no  difficulty  in  believing 
that  one  man  may  have  preferred  to  use  capital  letters  for  his 
inscription  at  the  same  period  when  another  and  his  companions 
avoided  them  almost  entirely  even  as  initial  letters  of  names. 
Moreover,  the  circumstances  were  altogether  different  in  the 
two  cases :  Cortereal  was  an  educated  man,  undoubtedly  ac- 
quainted with  literature  and  with  Latin,  and,  as  we  shall  con- 
clude, he  made  his  writing  large  and  prominent,  in  order  that 
it  might  be  surely  seen  and  thus  lead  to  his  rescue.  The  others, 
less  cultured  explorers  and  sailors,  were  merely  making  record 
of  a  visit. 

Some  doubters  have  expressed  wonder  why  these  writings 
were  not  read  by  the  first  observers  of  the  rock.  The  answer 
is  easy.  No  one  attempted  to  report  what  was  there  for  200 
years  after  the  record  was  made.  These  shallow  marks  were  at 
first  clearly  visible  because  when  fresh  they  would  have  been  of 
a  lighter  color  than  their  background.  But  long  before  the  200 
years  were  elapsed,  they  would  have  become  changed  to  the 
color  of  the  rock  itself  and  thus  hard  to  discern,  and  all  the 
more  so  because  they  were  battered  and  worn,  and  already 
overlaid  with  the  Indian  interpolations.  There  has  never  been 
a  time  since  observations  began  when  they  could  have  been 
read  successfully  on  the  rock  itself.  It  has  required  the  special 
conditions  of  improved  photographic  methods  to  bring  them 
out  into  satisfying  visibility. 

Having  found  Cortereal's  name  engraved  upon  the  rock,  we 
are  encouraged  to  look  for  more  that  he  may  have  written,  be- 
sides the  name  and  date.  And  we  can  find  something  which, 
while  not  entirely  certain,  is  exceedingly  plausible.  In  the  con- 
fusing tangle  of  lines  that  follow  his  name,  careful  study  shows 

^  Geographical  Journal,  1908,  xxxi.  590. 


Fig.  28.     The  right-hand  end  of  the  inscribed  surface 

a.  Section  of  flashlight  photograph  of  Jul}^  17,  1920 

b.  Probable  inscription  of  Miguel  Cortereal,   1511 

c.  Indian  glyphs  overlying  and  obscuring  the  Cortereal  inscriiitiim 


Facing  page  172 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  173 

that  it  is  possible,  rightly  or  wrongly,  to  read  something  definite. 
By  regarding  most  of  the  Hnes  as  Indian  additions,  but  select- 
ing certain  ones  among  them  as  constituting  the  original  writ- 
ing, we  can  discover  the  words  emphasized  in  the  middle  section 
of  Figure  28:  "V.  DEI  hIC  DVX  IND."  Under  it  is  carved 
the  heraldic  symbol  of  Portugal.  Expanding  the  abbrevia- 
tions, this  would  evidently  mean :  "Voluntate  Dei  hie  Dux  In- 
dorum."  If  actually  written  by  Cortereal,  he  thus  indicates 
that  he,  a  Portuguese,  by  pure  accident,  had  become  leader  or 
chief  of  the  natives  of  India  in  that  locality.  How  this  mes- 
sage was  obscured  by  the  overlying  and  interlacing  lines  of  later 
Indian  glyphs,  is  shown  in  the  lowest  division  of  this  Plate. 
There  is  no  question  that  the  shapes  of  these  letters  are  all  dis- 
tinctly there  in  those  positions  on  the  rock.  A  few  of  them, 
especially  the  IND,  appear  even  more  convincingly  in  the  flash- 
light photograph  of  Figure  5,  taken  from  an  entirely  different 
angle.  The  only  doubt  about  them  is  as  to  whether  they  are 
really  letters,  or  only  parts  of  the  neighboring  Indian  devices. 
The  sense  that  they  make,  and  the  consistent  way  in  which  they 
fit  into  all  the  other  features  of  our  story  as  we  shall  develop 
it  further,  make  it  almost  inevitable  that  we  should  accept  the 
reading  as  valid.  Moreover,  it  is  clear  that  none  of  these  marks 
are  of  recent  introduction.  Every  one  of  them  can  be  found 
by  careful  search  on  the  cast  of  1876.  They  are  almost  as 
convincingly  visible  in  the  daguerreotype  of  1853.  In  the 
earlier  drawings,  of  course,  they  were  never  all  brought  to- 
gether in  this  form,  yet  the  presence  of  each  is  unequivocally  in- 
dicated in  one  or  another  of  the  drawings  made  between  1767 
and  1834,  the  earliest  that  show  this  part  of  the  surface. 

That  the  escutcheon  truly  represents  the  arms  of  Portugal 
is  highly  probable  and  adds  confirmatory  evidence  to  our  read- 
ing of  the  name.  From  long  before  Cortereal's  time,  the  royal 
arms  of  Portugal  had  consisted  of  a  shield  within  a  shield,  the 
inner  one  containing  five  quinas  or  "five-spots"  of  small  dots  or 
squares."  When  exigencies  of  space  demanded,  one  quina 
within  the  two  shields  sufficed,  as  in  the  symbol  of  Portuguese 

2  The  one  shown  in  Figure  29  was  adopted  in  1485,  slightly  changed 
from  the  previous  one.    See  Geographical  Journal,  1900,  16 :  634. 


174  DIGHTON  ROCK 

discoveries  that  is  used  on  the  Cantino  chart  of  1502  (Figure 
29).  It  is  not  difficult  to  believe  that  when  there  was  no  room 
to  introduce  five  dots,  as  was  true  of  this  design  on  the  rock, 
one  dot  within  the  two  concentric  escutcheons  might  have  been 
regarded  as  an  equally  characteristic  symbol  of  Portugal.  It  is 
even  possible  that  originally  there  were  five  smaller  dots,  which 
someone  obscured  by  introducing  the  deeper  one  now  so  promi- 
nent. Traces  of  such  smaller  dots  suggest  themselves,  espe- 
cially if  the  large  one  is  examined  analytically  under  a  magnify- 
ing glass;  but  they  are  not  wholly  distinguishable  from 
natural  pittings.  The  device  is  clearly  of  the  shape  of  an 
heraldic  coat-of-arms,  and  it  is  noteworthy  that  of  all  the  na- 
tions of  the  earth,  in  the  fourteenth  century  at  least,  Portugal 
was  the  only  one  whose  arms  portrayed  a  shield  within  a 
shield.^ 

Aside  from  the  doubtful  claims  that  Norsemen  sailed  as 
far  south  as  New  England  more  than  nine  hundred  years  ago, 
the  first  explorer  heretofore  known  to  have  been  here  was  Ver- 
razano,  who  spent  two  weeks  in  lower  Narragansett  Bay  in 
1 524.  Cortereal  must  have  preceded  him  by  more  than  a  dozen 
years,  and  it  seems  probable  that  he  settled  among  the  friendly 
Indian  tribes  living  on  Assonet  Neck.  He  belonged  to  a  nation 
of  intrepid  and  famed  explorers,  of  whom  Harrisse  remarks 
that  "no  nation  in  the  fifteenth  century  exhibited  so  great  a 
spirit  of  maritime  enterprise  as  the  Portuguese."  Their  re- 
markable exploits  were  largely  due  to  the  enterprise,  skill,  and 
foresight  of  Prince  Henry  the  Navigator.  C.  R.  Beazley 
writes  of  him  in  the  Encyclopcedia  Britannica:  "The  glory 
attaching  to  the  name  of  Prince  Henry  does  not  rest  merely  on 
the  achievements  effected  during  his  own  lifetime,  but  on  the 
subsequent  results  to  which  his  genius  and  perseverance  had 
lent  the  primary  inspiration.  To  him  the  human  race  is  in- 
debted, in  large  measure,  for  the  maritime  exploration,  within 
one  century  (1420-1522),  of  more  than  half  the  globe,  and 
especially  of  the  great  waterways  from  Europe  to  Asia  both  by 

3  Book  of  the  Knowledge  of  all  the  Kingdoms,  Lands  and  Lordships 
that  are  in  the  World.  Written  by  a  Spanish  Franciscan  in  the  middle  of 
the  XIV  Century.    Hakluyt  Society,  1912. 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  175 

east  and  by  west.  .  .  .  The  prince's  share  has  often  been  forgot- 
ten in  that  of  pioneers  who  were  really  his  executors — Diogo 
Cam,  Bartholomew  Diaz,  or  Vasco  da  Gama."  There  are  even 
some  who  believe  that  a  Portuguese  discovered  America 
twenty  years  before  Columbus.  Thus  Sophus  Larsen  as- 
sembles evidence  which  proves,  he  thinks,  that  Joam  Vaz 
Cortereal,  father  of  Caspar  and  Miguel,  sailing  with  Pin- 
ing and  Pothorst  of  Scandinavia  in  1472,  discovered  New- 
foundland and  Labrador.  This  may  have  been  the  reason  why 
his  two  ill-fated  sons  later  sailed  to  make  further  explorations 
in  the  same  region,  which  was  long  known  as  the  Land  of 
Cortereal. 

It  may  be  that  this  story  of  the  elder  Cortereal  is  in  need  of 
further  confirmation.  But,  in  any  case,  it  is  well  known  that 
Caspar  Cortereal  in  1501  explored  the  coasts  of  Newfoundland 
and  Labrador,  eventually  sent  home  some  of  his  ships,  and  was 
never  heard  from  again.  His  brother  Miguel  desired  to  rescue 
him,  and  to  make  new  discoveries  himself.  Accordingly  he 
set  sail  from  Lisbon  on  May  10,  1502.  On  reaching  New- 
foundland, his  ships  separated  in  order  to  explore  more  thor- 
oughly, agreeing  to  meet  again  on  the  20th  of  August.  The 
two  other  ships  did  so,  but  eventually  had  to  return  home 
without  him.  The  world  has  "neuer  heard  any  more  newes 
of  him,  nor  yet  any  other  memorie,"  as  Galvam  wrote  in  1563. 
But  now,  if  our  reading  is  correct,  his  hitherto  unknown  fate  is 
at  last  revealed. 

He  must  have  sailed  far  to  the  south  in  his  search,  or,  if 
shipwrecked  in  Newfoundland,  he  must  have  escaped  from  the 
wreck  alive  and  then  pushed  on  to  the  south  in  an  attempt  to 
reach  the  Spanish  seas  where  he  might  find  an  opportunity  to 
return  home.  In  the  latter  case,  it  may  have  taken  him  years 
to  reach  Narragansett  Bay,  for  the  distance  was  great  and  he 
had  to  pass  through  or  sail  along  by  the  territory  of  Indians 
who  are  reported  to  have  been  "bad  people,  powerful,  and  great 
archers."  Here  he  found  a  race  that  was  kind,  gentle,  cour- 
teous, friendly,  according  to  the  testimony  of  all  early  voyagers. 
His  record  seems  to  indicate  that  he  settled  among  them.  It 
is  highly  probable,  therefore,  that  he  died  there  before  1524, 


176  DIGHTON  ROCK 

for  otherwise  he  would  have  been  informed  of  Verrazano's 
presence  and  would  have  joined  him.  On  the  other  hand,  it 
is  not  very  surprising  that  Verrazano  tells  us  nothing  about 
him,  for  his  narrative  implies  that  he  explored  to  a  distance 
of  not  more  than  five  or  six  leagues  beyond  Newport,  and  if 
the  natives  tried  to  inform  him  about  the  strange  white  man 
who  had  recently  dwelt  and  died  among  them,  he  would  have 
understood  nothing  of  what  they  were  trying  to  say.  By  the 
time  the  next  white  visitors  arrived  and  gained  power  to  con- 
verse with  the  natives,  about  three-quarters  of  a  century  later, 
the  Indians  had  apparently  retained  but  little  memory  of  the 
incident.  A  fragmentary  and  distorted  part  of  the  story  did 
persist  among  them,  however;  or,  at  least,  a  vague  tradition 
that  could  well  have  had  reference  to  Cortereal's  arrival  at 
Assonet  Neck. 

There  are  two  independent  versions  of  the  tradition,  one 
gathered  by  John  Danforth  in  1680,  the  other  by  Edward  A. 
Kendall  in  1807.  Danforth  said:  "It  is  reported  from  the 
tradition  of  old  Indians,  that  there  came  a  wooden  house,  and 
men  of  another  country  in  it,  swimming  up  the  river  Asonet, 
that  fought  the  Indians,  and  slew  their  Saunchem."  Kendall's 
version  is  a  little  more  detailed.  "As  to  traditions,  there  is, 
though  but  in  a  few  mouths,  an  Indian  tradition,  which  pur- 
ports, that  some  ages  past,  a  number  of  white  men  arrived  in 
the  river,  in  a  bird ;  that  the  white  men  took  Indians  into  the 
bird,  as  hostages ;  that  they  took  fresh  water  for  their  consump- 
tion at  a  neighboring  spring;  that  the  Indians  fell  upon  and 
slaughtered  the  white  men  at  the  spring;  that,  during  the 
afifray,  thunder  and  lightning  issued  from  the  bird;  that  the 
hostages  escaped  from  the  bird;  and  that  a  spring,  now  called 
White  Spring,  and  from  which  there  runs  a  brook,  called 
White  Man's  Brook,  has  its  name  from  this  event."* 

The  authenticity  of  the  tradition  in  its  main  features  is 
evidenced  by  its  two  independent  forms.  It  must  have  referred 
to  the  Indians'  earliest  experience  with  white  men  and  their 

•*  See  Figures  30  and  31.  The  brook  is  unquestionably  the  one  referred 
to  by  Kendall.  The  spring  shown  is  only  one  of  several  that  feed  the  brook, 
any  one  of  which,  or  even  another  not  now  discoverable,  may  have  been 
"White  Spring."     See  also  footnote  10. 


Fig.   30.      A    spring  near   Dightun    Ruck,    jiossilily   the   "White 
S])riiig"   of  tradition 


Fig.  31.     The  mouth   of   "White    Man's   Brook"   -And  beginning  of 
the    "Injun    Trail  " 

Facing  puc/c  776 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  177 

ships,  and  this,  by  the  testimony  of  the  rock,  was  on  the  occa- 
sion of  Cortereal's  arrival.  In  similar  manner,  the  Walam 
Olum  of  the  Delawares  mentions  only  the  earliest  contact  with 
the  new  race :  "At  this  time,  from  north  and  south,  the  whites 
came.  They  are  peaceful;  they  have  great  things;  who  are 
they?"  (Canto  V,  verses  59,  60).  In  our  local  case,  the 
strange  appearance  of  the  new  people,  the  marvelous  bird  or 
wooden  house  in  which  they  came,  and  the  conflict  that  fol- 
lowed, made  a  deep  and  lasting  impression  on  the  minds  of  the 
natives  that  had  not  disappeared  when  Kendall  pursued  his 
inquiries  300  years  later.  But  the  subsequent  events,  of  a  less 
startling  and  more  peaceful  character,  became  commonplace 
features  of  their  daily  lives.  It  is  no  more  extraordinary  that 
they  were  not  long  remembered,  than  it  is  that  most  people 
among  us  have  no  knowledge  of  their  great-grandfathers  and 
earlier  forebears.  Even  if  the  minuter  details  of  the  tradition 
do  not  apply  exactly  to  the  circumstances  of  Cortereal's  adven- 
ture, they  yet  suggest  a  plausible  reconstruction  of  those  cir- 
cumstances. Whether  he  explored  thus  far  in  his  original 
vessel,  or  was  shipwrecked  in  Newfoundland  and  came  hither 
in  a  smaller  sailboat,  he  arrived  eventually  in  Taunton  River. 
Sending  some  of  his  men  ashore  for  water,  they  came  into  con- 
flict with  the  natives.  The  men  who  went  to  the  spring  were 
slain,  as  was  also  the  Indian  sachem.  Cortereal  escaped,  and 
others  of  his  crew  who  had  remained  aboard  and  who  were 
responsible  for  the  "thunder  and  lightning''  that  "issued  from 
the  bird  during  the  aflfray."  We  must  assume  that  it  was  im- 
possible to  continue  the  voyage,  and  can  only  guess  at  the 
reason.  Perhaps  the  ship  had  become  disabled,  or  there  were 
too  few  left  to  handle  it.  Perhaps  they  were  all  held  captive  for 
a  while  by  the  natives.  Or  it  may  be  that  the  crew,  after  pass- 
ing a  winter  or  more  there,  found  some  way  of  going  on  and 
were  finally  lost  elsewhere ;  but  that  Cortereal,  then  about  sixty 
years  old,  was  too  ill  to  proceed,  or  too  exhausted  by  protracted 
hardships  endured  in  reaching  the  place.  But  we  must  also 
believe  that  eventually,  with  firearms  in  his  possession,  sufficient 
companions  to  help,  and  high  qualities  of  tact  and  leadership, 
he  seized  and  held  the  place  of  the  dead  sachem.     He  settled 


178  DIGHTON  ROCK 

there,  possibly  near  the  spring  mentioned;  and  it  was  because 
of  its  connection  with  him  that  it  and  the  brook  received 
the  names  that  Kendall  assigns  to  them.  His  name  on  the  rock 
was  meant  to  attract  the  attention  of  possible  new  explorers, 
and  thus  give  him  a  chance  to  return  home,  if  any  came.  The 
statement  that  he  was  leader  of  the  native  inhabitants  would 
tell  them  where  to  make  inquiries  in  order  to  find  him.  His 
reference  to  himself  as  "Dux"  would  also  have  been  justified 
by  his  letters-patent  from  the  king,  which  conveyed  to  him 
all  the  continents  and  islands  that  he  might  discover.  We  may 
not  have  related  all  of  the  circumstances  exactly  as  they 
occurred.  But  something  not  very  different  from  our  story 
must  have  taken  place,  and  the  consistency  of  the  whole  leads 
me  to  attach  a  considerable  degree  of  evidential  value  to  these 
traditions. 

But  why,  it  has  been  asked,  if  these  things  are  true,  were 
they  not  related  to  the  earliest  traders  and  settlers,  from  1600 
on,  instead  of  being  first  recorded  eighty  years  later,  and  then 
only  in  a  disappointingly  abbreviated  form?  The  Indians  of 
Colonial  times,  these  critics  continue,  knew  nothing  about  these 
incidents  and  could  give  no  account  of  the  origin  of  the  inscrip- 
tion on  Dighton  Rock.  These  are,  however,  unjustified  in- 
ferences. Their  only  basis  is  the  absence  during  those  eighty 
years  of  any  reports  about  these  matters,  and  this  proves  noth- 
ing. Even  if  the  Indians  had  still  retained  a  memory  of  these 
events,  it  is  hardly  likely  that  they  would  have  spoken  of  them, 
or  that  their  hearers  would  have  recorded  them,  for  the  traders 
and  colonists  were  not  interested  in  such  vague  historical  allu- 
sions. From  the  time  when  Cortereal  carved  his  record,  more 
than  a  hundred  years  had  elapsed  before  the  Pilgrims  came  to 
Plymouth,  more  than  150  before  Danforth  exhibited  the 
first  slight  casual  interest  in  the  rock,  more  than  two  hun- 
dred before  Greenwood  made  the  first  serious  inquiries  about 
it.  By  that  time  the  writing  was  illegible,  and  it  is  not  sur- 
prising that  the  memory  of  the  Indians  had  almost  wholly 
faded.  A  fragmentary  and  distorted  part  of  the  story  did  per- 
sist among  them,  however,  as  we  have  seen,  down  to  the  time 
of  Kendall's  investigation  in  1807.    Why  it  mentioned  only  the 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  179 

more  striking  incidents  connected  with  the  first  arrival  of  the 
strangers,  and  not  the  later  events  of  equal  interest  to  us,  has 
been  already  made  clear. 

There  are  a  few  additional  details  that  were  gathered  by 
Danforth  and  by  Kendall,  of  which  I  have  not  previously 
spoken.  They  were  not  related  by  these  men  as  part  of  the 
story  of  the  principal  tradition,  but  as  unrelated  circumstances. 
Danforth,  possibly  because  the  suggestion  had  been  given  to 
him  by  the  Indians,  interpreted  one  of  the  figures  of  the  in- 
scription as  "a  ship  without  masts,  a  mere  Wrack,  cast  upon 
the  shoales."  Kendall  heard  rumors  of  a  rust-eaten  ship's 
anchor  that  had  long  previously  been  found  near  the  rock;  of 
a  wrecked  ship  that  had  lain  and  rotted  there;  and  of  a  ship's 
crew  of  long  ago  that  had  passed  a  winter  in  the  vicinity.  Some 
or  all  of  these  rumors  may  well  have  had  an  actual  connection 
with  the  circumstances  of  Cortereal's  visit,  and  add  a  little 
of  detail  and  confirmation. 

An  interesting  possibility  has  been  suggested  by  several  of 
those  who  have  recently  commented  upon  these  new  discoveries. 
"Who  can  say,"  says  one  of  them,  "that  the  blood  of  this  Por- 
tuguese adventurer" — or,  we  should  add,  of  one  of  his  younger 
companions — "was  not  coursing  in  the  veins  of  King  Philip 
himself  some  150  years  later?"  Another  supports  the  same 
suggestion  in  these  words :  "No  trace  of  European  blood  was 
ever  noted  among  the  Indians  of  Assonet  Neck.  But  of  course 
none  was  ever  looked  for  in  the  early  days  when  it  might  have 
been  noted.  A  trace  of  Latin  blood,  a  sign  of  a  race  marked 
by  black  eyes  and  hair  and  olive  complexion,  after  a  few  gener- 
ations is  less  easy  to  find  than  a  Nordic  strain  that  gives  a  dis- 
tinct new  trend  to  type."  Apart  from  this  possibility  of  blood 
descent,  a  third  reviewer  has  said  something  that  may  well  be 
true:  "It  is  not  unreasonable  to  suppose  that  Cortereal's  in- 
fluence was  that  which  resulted  in  the  Wampanoag's  place  in 
history — that  of  the  most  intelligent  tribe  of  Indians  in 
America,  a  tribe  that,  faced  with  extermination,  preferred  to 
die  fighting." 

I  have  thought  that  some  slight  further  evidence  might 
possibly  lie  in  the  names  of  some  of  the  Indians  who  were 


180  DIGHTON  ROCK 

known  to  the  Pilgrim  Fathers.  Suppose  that  the  Indians 
among  whom  Cortereal  found  a  home  were  particularly  im- 
pressed by  two  things  about  their  foreign  leader  and  the 
"magic"  that  he  had  cut  into  the  rock :  the  first  part  of  his 
name,  and  the  quinas  that  symbolized  the  country  from  which 
he  came.  They  might  have  learned  to  call  him  by  the  com- 
bination of  the  two — Corte-quina,  Portuguese  Corte.  Then, 
according  to  frequent  European  custom,  this  name  might  have 
been  passed  on  to  later  sachems,  and  have  reappeared  a  hundred 
years  later  in  the  name  of  Massasoit's  brother,  Quadequina. 
White  men  heard  Indian  names  very  inexactly,  and  spelled 
them  in  numerous  varying  ways ;  so  that  the  difference  in  spell- 
ing here  does  not  invalidate  this  derivation.  The  first  part  of 
the  name,  it  may  be,  occurs  again  without  much  variation  in  the 
name  of  Corbitant;  and  the  second  part  in  Massasoit's  own 
other  name,  Ossame-quin,  and  in  Tuspa-quin.  William  B. 
Cabot,  of  Boston,  to  whose  judgment  we  must  accord  much 
weight,  can  feel  nothing  but  plain  Indian  in  these  names ;  and 
justly  says,  moreover,  that  when  an  Indian  dies,  anyone  else 
of  the  same  name  at  once  abandons  it,  in  order  to  avoid  very 
bad  things.  Still,  there  were  exceptions.  Among  the  Nar- 
ragansetts,  there  was  a  second  Canonicus,  nephew  of  the  first. 
Descendants  of  Europeans  might  have  been  free  from  the  in- 
hibiting superstition  and  have  departed  from  the  prevailing 
Indian  custom.  In  any  case,  these  resemblances,  in  view  of  all 
the  other  circumstances,  constitute  a  very  curious  coincidence 
that  is  worth  considering  as  having  been  possibly  more  than 
mere  coincidence. 

Whether  there  is  much  or  little  value  in  the  individual  con- 
jectures that  we  have  added  to  the  undoubted  facts,  together 
they  form  an  impressive  body  of  evidence.  We  may  refuse 
to  be  impressed  by  some  one  or  other  among  them,  but  we  can- 
not reject  them  all.  The  known  history  of  Cortereal,  his  name 
on  the  rock,  the  fitting  date,  the  pertinent  additional  message, 
the  form  of  the  letters  used,  the  shield  of  Portugal,  the  wooden 
house  of  Danforth,  the  bird  of  Kendall,  the  wrecked  ships  of 
them  both,  the  story  of  conflict,  the  names  of  spring  and  brook, 
the  rumor  of  a  ship's  crew  wintering  there  long  ago,  the  excep- 


K 


Fig.    32.       The     "Thacher"     writing     on     Dighton     Rock,     1592: 

a.     Section  of  flashlight  photograph  of  July  17,  1920 
h.     The  same,  with  the  "Thacher"  reading  emphasized 

Facing  page  180 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  181 

tional  character  of  the  later  Wampanoags  that  might  thus  be 
so  readily  explained,  the  persistence  in  similarity  of  names — 
here  are  more  than  a  dozen  separate  things  that  weave  together 
into  a  consistent  and  plausible  story.  Every  known  fact  and 
rumor  falls  readily  into  place  without  contradiction.  It  would 
be  too  much  to  dismiss  it  all  as  a  mass  of  disconnected  coinci- 
dences. The  first  four  letters  of  the  name  Miguel  and  the  first 
six  of  Cortereal,  are  beyond  question  inscribed  on  Dighton 
Rock.  With  this  assurance,  and  with  the  confirmatory  indica- 
tions given  by  the  other  details  just  mentioned,  it  is  not  difficult 
to  accept  the  entire  record  as  highly  probable:  "Miguel  Cor- 
tereal. 1511.  By  the  Will  of  God,  leader  of  the  natives  of 
India  in  this  place,"  followed  by  the  Portuguese  coat-of-arms. 
Then,  finally,  the  entire  story,  as  we  have  attempted  to  recon- 
struct it  by  aid  of  the  tradition  and  other  pertinent  considera- 
tions, becomes  an  almost  certainly  correct  account  of  the  latest 
incidents  in  the  life  of  Miguel  Cortereal. 

The  writings  by  Cortereal,  it  will  be  remembered,  are  not 
the  only  ones  on  Dighton  Rock.  With  few  exceptions,  the  de- 
cision as  to  what  the  others  are  is  even  more  difficult  than  it 
was  to  decipher  his.  There  is  a  fair  degree  of  probability  for 
the  presence  of  the  record :  "Thacher  1592,"  as  we  have  drawn 
it  in  Figure  32.  It  is  entirely  possible,  for  the  name  was  a 
current  one  in  the  seacoast  counties  of  England,  whose  fisher- 
men had  long  been  making  the  voyage  to  Newfoundland  in 
considerable  numbers.  Many  of  them  had  doubtless  penetrated 
to  New  England  in  their  search  for  cod,  long  before  the  end 
of  the  century.  The  evidence  for  this  is  convincing.  Within 
the  hundred  years  following  the  discovery  by  Columbus,  nu- 
merous unrecorded  voyages  were  made  all  along  our  coasts. 
Henry  Harrisse"  speaks  of  many  by  unknown  Spanish  and 
Portuguese  explorers  that  must  have  occurred  before  1502. 
KohP  finds  evidence  that  men  of  Bristol  in  England  had  been 
in  the  New  Found  Land  by  that  time,  besides  those  who  sailed 
with  John  Cabot  in  1497  and  1498.    Prowse'^  confirms  this,  and 

"  Henry  Harrisse,  Discovery  of  North  America,  pp.  124ff,  249. 

8  J.  G.  Kohl,  History  of  Maine,  pp.  185ff. 

^  D.  W.  Prowse,  History  of  Newfoundland,  pp.  4,  12,  41,  57. 


182  DIGHTON  ROCK 

further  assures  us  on  good  grounds  that  "from  1504  onward, 
for  a  hundred  years  following,  Newfoundland  was  visited 
every  year  by  an  annually  increasing  number  of  fishermen," 
and  that  before  1527,  and  again  especially  later  in  the  century. 
Englishmen  and  others  fished  and  explored  frequently  not  only 
in  Newfoundland  but  as  far  at  least  as  the  coast  of  Maine.  Mr. 
C.  C.  Willoughby,  Director  of  the  Peabody  Museum  of  Har- 
vard University,  tells  me  that  numerous  relics  from  Indian 
graves  testify  to  the  frequent  presence  of  traders  along  the 
New  England  coast  before  1600.  When  the  clear  light  of  his- 
tory first  fully  illumines  events  in  New  England  shortly  after 
1600,  we  meet  with  abundant  proof  that  its  waters  had  been 
already  a  familiar  resort  of  French  and  English  fishermen  "for 
divers  years  before."^  By  1620,  the  fisheries  in  New  England 
were  represented  in  Parliament  as  far  better  than  those  of  New- 
foundland.® There  is  not  the  slightest  degree  of  improbability, 
therefore,  affecting  our  reading  of  the  date  1592.  That  the 
name  was  actually  engraved  on  the  rock,  however,  is  not  much 
more  than  a  guess,  advanced  only  as  the  most  plausible  reading 
yet  suggesting  itself  of  certain  partially  visible  and  otherwise 
unexplained  characters  of  the  inscription.  It  will  be  noticed 
that  some  lines  that  we  assign  to  this  name  were  used  before 
in  the  word  "hie"  attributed  to  Cortereal,  and  some  again  as 
helping  to  form  the  Indian  pictograph  of  a  deer.  But  such  a 
threefold  interpretation  need  not  distress  us.  In  numerous 
places  on  the  rock,  portions  of  an  earlier  inscription  have  been 
covered  over  by  a  later  artist  or  utilized  by  him  to  form  ingredi- 
ents in  his  own  design. 

The  word  "Spring"  and  some  neighboring  features  §hown 
in  Figure  33  are  almost  indubitably  present.  But  a  suggestion 
as  to  the  further  context  of  this  word  that  is  ventured  in  Fig- 
ure 34  is  presented  with  a  very  great  deal  of  hesitation.  That 
a  spring  plays  a  prominent  part  in  the  Cortereal  story  and  that 
the  word  appears  also  on  the  rock,  is  of  course  merely  a  curious 
coincidence.    It  can  have  no  reference  to  Cortereal.    One  possi- 

*  Bradford,  History  of  Plymouth  Plantations,  M.  H.  S.  edition,  I.,  208n, 
360n. 

9  Bradford,  op.  cit.,  I.  103n. 


Cotyrighf,  1927,  by  E.  B.  Dclaharrc 
Fig.   33.      Part   of   the    left-hand   end   of    the    inscribed    surface: 

a.  Section  of  flashlight  photograph  of  June  27,   1922 

b.  The  same  with  pictographes  and  records  em])hasized 

Facing  page  1S2 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  183 

bility  concerning  it  is  so  very  plausible  that  there  seems  to  be 
very  little  doubt  about  its  being  correct.  Very  soon  after  the 
settlement  of  Taunton  in  1637,  the  proprietors  began  using  the 
salt-meadows  about  Assonet  Neck  as  their  chief  source  of  hay. 
The  earliest  haymakers  came  in  boats,  the  eight  miles  down  the 
river,  and  passed  by  this  rock  with  Cortereal's  writing  upon  it, 
perhaps  already  too  obscure  to  read  after  the  lapse  of  130  years. 
Their  principal  meadows  lay  only  a  short  distance  beyond.  One 
of  their  chief  needs  while  there  would  have  been  a  source  of 
good  water.  About  twenty  rods  above  the  rock  is  the  mouth  of 
a  small  brook,  draining  a  considerable  swamp  (Figure  31). 
The  firm  upland  at  the  farther  side  of  the  swamp,  where  the 
latter  comes  down  to  the  river,  begins  just  "167"  yards,  or 
three  foot  paces,  from  the  rock,  and  the  arrow  on  the  latter 
points  almost  directly  to  this  spot.  Here  a  foot-path  now 
climbs  the  river-bank,  and  continues  in  a  woodroad  skirting  the 
edge  of  the  swamp.  Although  no  noticeable  spring  is  now 
discoverable  feeding  the  brook,  and  although  the  names  men- 
tioned by  Kendall  appear  to  have  become  wholly  unknown,  yet 
Kendall  in  1807  undoubtedly  believed  that  this  brook  was 
White  Man's  Brook,  and  he  observed  a  spring  near  its  source, 
near  the  foot  of  a  hill  at  the  distance  of  a  quarter  of  a  mile 
from  the  rock  and  the  river,  which  he  took  to  be  identical  with 
the  White  Spring  of  the  tradition.  If  he  was  right,  then  there 
was  a  spring,  now  filled  in  with  mud  and  growths,  probably 
known  earlier  by  the  Indians  and  approached  from  the  river  by 
a  trail  which  has  become  the  modern  woodroad."  Before  the 
various  springs  of  the  neighborhood  had  been  located  by  the 
early  haymakers,  a  direction  pointing  the  way  to  this  one  would 

^^  Kendall  described  the  spring  as  one  from  which  runs  the  brook,  and 
as  being  located  near  the  foot  of  a  hill  to  the  northeast  of  Dighton  Rock,  at 
the  distance  of  a  quarter  of  a  mile  both  from  the  rock  and  the  river,  on  the 
farm  of  a  Mr.  Asa  Shove  (in  1807).  His  direction  was  surely  mistaken  and 
should  doubtless  read  "southeast,"  the  error  being  due  to  the  fact  that  he 
thought  that  the  northwesterly  course  of  the  brook  was  southwest.  But 
aside  from  that  error,  I  find  no  spring  that  corresponds  to  all  of  his  descrip- 
tions. The  only  one  now  evident  is  very  near  Bay  View  Avenue  (see 
Figure  3),  a  full  half-mile  from  the  river,  and  not,  so  far  as  I  can  discover 
from  the  land  records  at  Taimton,  on  land  formerly  owned  by  Asa  Shove. 
More  nearly  at  Kendall's  distance  of  a  quarter-mile,  I  have  dug  out  several 
springy  places  on  the  edge  of  the  swamp,  without  satisfying  myself  that  any 
one  of  them  is  the  one  he  meant.    One  of  these  is  pictured  in  Figure  30. 


184  DIGHTON  ROCK 

have  been  useful.  This  would  argue  that  it  was  made  shortly 
after  the  settlement  of  Taunton,  and  so  also  would  the  fact 
that  these  marks,  as  well  as  those  made  by  Cortereal,  had  be- 
come illegible  by  the  time  that  the  earliest  drawings  were  made, 
in  1712  and  1730.  Danforth,  in  1680,  drew  only  the  parts 
of  the  inscription  lying  higher  up,  the  rest  of  the  rock  being 
probably  under  water  at  the  time  of  his  visit.  I  conclude  that 
the  haymakers  placed  such  a  sign  on  our  rock  at  some  time  very 
near  to  1640,  and  that  it  probably  included  other  words  in  addi- 
tion to  "Spring."  What  these  words  were  is  not  at  all  sure. 
I  find  it  possible  to  read  them  in  the  manner  suggested  in  Fig- 
ure 34:  "Injun  Trail  to  Spring  in  Swomp  (pointing  arrow) 
Yds  167."  Some  of  this  is  fairly  distinct,  especially  the  frag- 
ments :  "—JU—IL— SPRING— SW— 167."  The  rest  is  little 
more  than  guesswork,  supported  by  the  appropriateness  of  the 
words  and  by  the  fact  that  the  assumption  of  their  presence 
explains  consistently  quite  a  number  of  the  lines  on  the  rock. 

These  seem  to  be  all  of  the  writings  by  white  men,  except 
for  dates  and  initials  of  more  recent  times.  We  have  every 
reason  to  believe  that  everything  else  upon  the  rock  was  the 
work  of  the  native  Indians.  The  deer,  the  turtle,  the  two 
Indians  with  joined  hands,  the  other  human  figures,  are  prod- 
ucts of  characteristically  Indian  art.  No  other  origin  is  rea- 
sonably suggested  by  anything  else  that  we  can  discover  there. 
Whether  any  of  these  Indian  records  were  made  before  Cor- 
tereal used  the  surface  cannot  be  surely  decided,  but  it  is  highly 
improbable.  The  central  position  of  his  name,  and  the  way  in 
which  the  rest  of  his  message  sprawls  freely  over  the  rock, 
seem  to  indicate  that  the  entire  surface  was  available  for  his 
writing.  Many  of  the  carvings  are  unquestionably  drawn  over 
his  and  of  later  date.  Study  of  the  other  petroglyphs  scattered 
about  Narragansett  Bay,  as  we  shall  see,  argues  that  they,  at 
least,  were  motived  by  the  example  of  the  whites  of  Colonial 
days.  It  seems  unquestionable,  then,  that  it  was  Cortereal's 
example,  reinforced  by  more  intimate  acquaintance  with  white 
men's  writings  after  1600  and  by  still  later  development  of  the 
Indian  practice  of  affixing  signatures  to  deeds,  that  inaugurated 
among  the  local  Indians  the  first  imitative  efforts  to  accom- 


'•3>'»/«( 


•rtiiifCtriiP 


't*  iiV«  JLjSL^  j' " 


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KOS/fo-] 


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Fiu.    .^J.      Conjectural    cumpk'ti.in    of    the    "Spring"    inscription,    about 
1640 

(/.     Section    of    flashlight    photograph    of    July    17,    1920 
/'.     The   same  with   the  writing  emphasized 


Facing   page   184 


A  NEW  INTERPRETATION  185 

plish  something  similar.  Study  of  all  of  the  discoverable  evi- 
dence leads  me  to  believe  that  the  same  was  true  throughout 
New  England.  The  Indians  of  this  region  had  no  knowledge 
even  of  pictographic  writing  before  contact  with  white  men 
suggested  the  idea  to  them.  These  Indian  records  belong,  then, 
in  all  probability,  to  the  period  extending  from  about  1640  to 
about  1675. 

The  Indian  contributions  to  Dighton  Rock  do  not  form  a 
connected  story,  but  were  evidently  made  by  many  different 
individuals  and  on  different  occasions.  Many  of  them  are 
doubtless  meaningless  scribblings,  others  merely  trivial  pictures. 
Some  of  them,  especially  the  more  regularly  formed  designs, 
may  have  had  a  more  elaborate  symbolical  purpose,  but  any- 
thing of  that  sort  would  have  been  probably  so  local  and  tem- 
porary and  unimportant  that  we  are  not  likely  ever  to  discover 
what  particular  objects  and  ideas  their  authors  had  in  mind. 
It  is  not  at  all  easy  to  decide  just  what  most  of  the  Indian 
records  were.  Some  of  them,  enumerated  at  the  beginning  of 
this  chapter,  were  fairly  deep  and  sure.  The  rest,  of  which 
there  were  certainly  a  great  many,  were  carved  in  a  very  shallow 
manner,  often  intermingling  and  covering  one  another.  Some 
of  their  lines  have  wholly  disappeared,  and  the  remainder  can 
be  seen  in  almost  innumerable  alternative  ways.  I  have  made, 
however,  in  spite  of  these  difficulties,  an  attempt  to  reconstruct 
the  entire  confused  mass  of  records  on  Dighton  Rock,  so  far 
as  it  is  possible  to  make  a  plausible  interpretation  of  them 
(Figure  35).  At  least  seventy-five  per  cent,  of  my  renderings 
are  different  from  those  of  all  previous  drawings  and  chalkings. 
Since  this  version  has  been  derived  from  painstaking  study  of 
unprejudiced  photographs,  and  not  from  the  less  dependable 
study  of  the  rock  itself,  I  regard  it  as  unquestionably  much 
nearer  to  the  truth.  It  will  probably  be  forever  impossible  to 
decipher  the  entire  collection  of  inscriptions  with  certainty. 
It  is  inevitable  that  I  must  have  missed  many  significant  details 
and  connecting  lines,  and  must  have  included  much  that  is  ex- 
ceedingly dubious.  In  spite  of  its  unavoidable  defects,  however, 
I  offer  it  as  a  distinct  improvement  over  previous  depictions, 
and  as  the  best  that  I  can  devise  in  the  reading  of  this  intensely 
interesting  and  exceedingly  difficult  document.     For  reasons 


185  DIGHTON  ROCK 

that  I  have  already  made  plain,  I  make  no  attempt  to  interpret 
the  meaning  of  any  of  the  Indian  contributions,  if,  indeed,  they 
possess  any  meaning  at  all. 

Probably  everything  of  real  interest  upon  the  rock  has  now 
been  deciphered  with  approximate  correctness.  It  teaches  a 
respectable  number  of  hitherto  unsuspected  historical  facts, 
which  can  be  regarded  as  sure,  however,  only  to  the  degree  to 
which  my  new  readings  are  accepted  as  well  founded.  In  the 
first  place,  it  makes  it  practically  certain  thit  Miguel  Cortereal, 
lost  to  sight  on  the  coast  of  Newfoundland  in  1502,  neverthe- 
less survived,  and,  in  his  original  ship  or  in  a  smaller  sailboat, 
made  his  way  to  Assonet  Neck  in  the  present  town  of  Berkeley 
in  Massachusetts,  was  interrupted  in  his  voyage,  probably  be- 
cause of  a  conflict  with  the  natives  in  which  most  of  his  com- 
panions were  slain,  became  leader  of  the  Indians,  left  his  name 
and  the  date  1511  upon  this  rock  on  the  edge  of  Taunton  River, 
and  probably  made  his  home  there  until  his  death.  Secondly, 
it  seems  to  indicate  that  an  English  fisherman  named  Thach  or 
Thacher  may  have  visited  the  place  in  1592.  Next,  it  bears 
directions,  probably  carved  by  Taunton  haymakers  about  1640, 
for  finding  a  spring  of  water.  Further,  it  gives  evidence  that 
it  was  the  example  of  Cortereal  and  of  later  white  men  that 
first  suggested  to  the  Indians  the  idea  of  making  rock-records 
for  themselves,  and  thenceforward  they  doubtless  continued  the 
practice  at  intervals  until  about  the  time  of  King  Philip's  War. 
Finally,  it  contributes  to  knowledge  of  the  earliest  graphic  and 
artistic  efforts  of  New  England  Indians,  and  supports  the  be- 
lief that  they  were  only  insignificant  scribblings  and  pictures, 
and  in  no  case  records  of  important  or  historical  events.  This 
famous  rock,  then,  is  not  so  full  of  wonder  and  strange  tales  as 
has  often  been  proclaimed  of  it  in  the  past,  nor  is  it  so  trivial 
and  commonplace  as  current  archaeological  opinion  assumes. 
It  has  had  the  misfortune  of  being  assigned  always  either  too 
exaggerated  or  too  insignificant  a  value.  With  the  better, 
though  still  incomplete  understanding  of  it  which  we  have 
gained,  it  should  be  possible  now  for  Dighton  Rock  to  take  the 
dignified  and  respectable  position  that  it  deserves,  of  recogni- 
tion as  an  historical  record  of  moderate,  yet  genuine  impor- 
tance, and  the  earliest  one  known  in  New  England. 


iSM 


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X    O 


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OCH 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE    MOUNT    HOPE   ROCK 

There  are  many  other  inscribed  stones  in  the  region  about 
Narragansett  Bay,  besides  the  one  known  as  Dighton  Rock.  In 
spite  of  the  vigorous  debate  which  has  centered  about  the  latter, 
the  others  remain  without  adequate  description.  One  who  de- 
sires to  inspect  them  all  meets  with  difficulty  in  securing  a  com- 
plete list,  and  then  in  finding  them  when  he  knows  their 
approximate  location.  Several  of  them  seem  never  to  have  been 
mentioned  in  print. 

A  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago  Ezra  Stiles,  then  minister 
at  Newport  and  later  President  of  Yale  College,  found  inscrip- 
tion-rocks at  five  different  places  within  this  region.  His  care- 
fully made  drawings  and  observations  were  never  published. 
Again,  about  ninety  years  ago.  Dr.  Thomas  H.  Webb  and  John 
R.  Bartlett,  as  a  committee  of  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  So- 
ciety, sought  out  and  made  drawings  of  all  the  inscribed  rocks 
that  they  could  discover.  Their  results,  though  published,  are 
not  now  easily  accessible.  Since  then  no  similar  study  has  been 
made,  until  this  present  investigation  was  undertaken. 

The  one  commonly  known  as  the  Mount  Hope  Rock  is  situ- 
ated on  the  shore  of  Mount  Hope  Bay,  in  Bristol,  a  little  north 
of  the  base  of  Mount  Hope,  and  south  of  the  Narrows  of  the 
Kickamuit  River,  The  chart  of  Figure  36  indicates  its  posi- 
tion, and  the  next  following  figures  show  its  appearance  and 
help  in  identifying  it.  The  rock  is  low,  flat-topped,  of  rela- 
tively small  thickness,  lying  flat  on  the  beach.  It  measures  five 
to  seven  and  a  half  feet  in  width,  ten  and  a  half  in  length,  and 
sixteen  to  twenty-four  inches  in  thickness.  In  shape  it  is  nearly 
an  oblong  rectangle  with  a  triangular  point  projecting  outward 
toward  the  water,  and  a  slight  inward  curve  on  the  side  toward 
the  bank.    Like  Dighton  Rock,  this  one  is  of  the  kind  which 

187 


188  DIGHTON  ROCK 

used  to  be  called  graywacke,  but  may  be  more  definitely  de- 
scribed as  a  very  fine-grained  slightly  argillaceous  sandstone, 
rather  quartzose,  with  frequent  minute  particles  of  an  indis- 
tinguishable mineral  which  weathers  rusty,  imparting  in  the 
weathered  zone — which  may  be  from  ^  to  3^  inch  deep — a 
brownish  tone  to  the  prevailing  bluish-gray  color  of  the  fresh 
rock. 

A  striking  feature  of  the  surface  is  the  occurrence  within 
it  of  a  number  of  large  circular  or  oval  patches  of  a  darker 
gray  and  much  harder  consistency,  which  seem  to  be  what  one 
observer  mistakenly  regarded  as  marine  fossils.  The  inscrip- 
tion occupies  a  very  small  portion  of  the  surface,  close  to  the 
point  which  projects  out  toward  the  water.  The  position  is 
well  shown  in  Professor  Munro's  drawing.  The  line  of 
apparent  letters  is  twenty-one  inches  in  length,  and  two  and  one- 
fourth  inches  in  average  height  of  the  individual  characters. 
Its  exact  appearance  is  shown  clearly  in  Figure  38.  In  examin- 
ing this,  it  is  well  to  realize  that  the  rock  surface  is  broken 
away  in  some  places  and  is  worn  everywhere,  obscuring  the 
characters  more  or  less.  Moreover,  a  few  natural  cracks  are 
intermingled  with  the  artificial  characters  and  must  not  be  taken 
as  part  of  the  latter,  though  it  is  not  always  possible  to  dis- 
tinguish them  with  certainty.  However,  as  is  shown  by  the 
comparative  table  which  appears  later  (Figure  42),  no  one, 
unless  Bacon,  has  regarded  as  artificial  the  prominent  line,  run- 
ning vertically  in  the  photograph,  below  the  left-hand  corner  of 
the  boat,  nor  the  horizontal  one  running  leftward  from  the 
top  of  the  character  to  which  our  table  assigns  the  number  6. 
Character  number  1  is  at  the  extreme  edge  of  the  rock,  and  is 
not  very  clear.  Between  characters  3  and  4  is  a  moderately 
wide  space ;  and  between  4  and  6  a  relatively  very  wide  one,  in 
which  was  a  character  not  easy  to  read  because  of  scaling. 
The  lines  are  narrow,  clear-cut  for  the  most  part,  smoothly 
engraved  as  if  by  a  sharp  iron  tool,  not,  as  in  most  of  the  rocks 
of  the  region,  pecked  in  by  blows  of  a  blunter  point,  probably 
in  some  cases  that  of  a  stone  implement.  Among  the  figures, 
the  depiction  of  an  unmistakable  boat  is  prominent.  Leftward 
and  a  little  above  it  is  a  group  of  marks  that  Miller  has  drawn 


-  'ft  s      f^        /  ,     ^  d  >~^ 


Fig.  36.  Chart  of  the  vicinity  of  Mount  Hope,  Bristol,  R.  T.  The  Rock 
is  on  the  shore,  about  one-eighth  inch  aliove  the  road  marked  .\.  Routes 
of  approach  marked  by  heavy  lines.  A,  private  road;  B,  Metacom  Ave- 
nue;  C,  Hope   Street;   I),   Bay  View  Avenue;  F,   W'oodlawn  Avenue;   G, 

Griswold  A\enue 

Fciiiiig  page  IS^ 


THE  MOUNT  HOPE  ROCK 


189 


j'jA 


^=37 


Figure  39— By  William  J.  Miller,  1880. 


Figure  40— By  Wilfred  H.  Munro,  1880. 


Figure  41— By  Edgar  M.  Bacon,  1904. 
Drawings  of  the  Mount  Hope  Inscription 


190  DIGHTON  ROCK 

in  a  manner  suggesting  somewhat  a  large  wigwam  with  smaller 
ones  near  it,  or  possibly  a  church  in  a  village.  This  group,  al- 
most surely  not  artificial,  although  neglected  by  all  except 
Miller,  shows  plainly  in  the  photograph.  Underneath  the  boat 
is  a  line  that  appears  to  be  composed  of  alphabetic,  syllabic,  or 
ideographic  characters  "in  an  unknown  tongue."  Besides  this 
older  inscription,  a  considerable  number  of  more  modern 
initials  mar  the  surface  of  the  rock,  and  one  of  these  silly  and 
futile  attempts  at  ego-maximation  has  unfortunately  been 
made  over  a  portion  of  the  inscription  itself  since  the  photo- 
graph was  taken. 

Three  independent  drawings  of  the  inscription  have  been 
published,  by  Miller  in  1880  and  1885  (Figure  39),  Munro  in 
1880  and  1881  (Figure  40),  and  Bacon  in  1904  (Figure  41). 
For  better  comparison,  the  characters  of  the  inscription  as  they 
appear  in  these  drawings  are  again  given,  together  with  two 
unpublished  versions  of  the  same  inscription,  in  Figure  42. 

There  is  considerable  evidence,  in  the  form  of  rather  con- 
vincing tradition,  that  the  rock  once  rested  in  the  field  above 
the  low  clifif  or  bank  near  the  base  of  which  it  now  lies.  There 
it  is  within  reach  of  the  tides,  being  entirely  submerged  at  times 
of  extreme  high  water.  It  is  said  to  have  been  once  surrounded 
by  a  much  larger  number  of  boulders  and  pebbles,  many  of 
which  were  removed  during  the  construction  of  the  neighboring 
wharf.  There  is  even  a  tenous  rumor  of  another  inscribed 
stone  having  once  lain  nearby,  which  someone,  wearied  of  the 
Norse  disputes,  turned  over  in  order  that  it  might  not  foster 
further  controversy. 

As  to  the  age  of  the  inscription.  Miller  claims  that  the  rock 
"was  known  to  the  early  English  settlers,"  and  that  its  char- 
acters "bear  marks  of  great  antiquity;"  and  he  speaks  of  it 
again  as  "an  inscription  that  the  Indians  had  called  to  the  atten- 
tion of  the  early  visitors  to  Mount  Hope,  and  disclaimed  all 
knowledge  of  its  origin."  These  and  similar  misleading  state- 
ments made  by  other  writers  are  confessedly  based  upon  tradi- 
tion only,  not  on  records;  and  we  shall  see  that  the  traditions 
are  wholly  fictional  and  probably  of  recent  manufacture. 

The  first  genuine  hint  of  the  rock's  existence  seems  at  first 


F'ig.  37.     The  Mount  Hopx-  Rock  as  seen  irum  thv  nortliwtst 


Fig.   38.     The    inscription   on    Mount    Hope   Rock 


Faciitg  page  190 


THE  MOUNT  HOPE  ROCK  191 

sight  to  be  contained  in  a  statement  made  in  1835  by  Dr. 
Thomas  H.  Webb  in  a  letter  to  Rafn,  to  the  effect  that  "Mr. 
Almy  understood  Dr.  Stiles,  in  1780,  to  say,  that  an  Inscription 
Rock  was  situated  near  Mount  Hope."^  Webb,  who  with 
Bartlett  sought  diligently  for  all  such  rocks,  did  not  succeed  in 
finding  it;  and  we  shall  argue  later  that  this  passage  does  not 
necessarily  help  in  any  way  to  establish  the  sure  date  of  its 
existence.  When  Diman  first  wrote  of  it  in  1845,  it  had  been 
known  at  some  time  previously,  but  it  was  then  believed  that  it 
had  been  destroyed,  and  that  when  known  it  bore  characters 
that  were  strange  and  were  thought  to  be  old.  How  great  an 
age  it  is  necessary  to  assign  to  it  as  a  minimum  on  that  basis 
depends  on  the  question  as  to  how  long  it  requires  for  such  a 
tradition  to  grow;  and  this  is  reserved  for  later  discussion. 
After  a  period  of  unknown  beginning  and  of  unknown  length 
during  which  its  location  was  known,  it  was  lost  to  view  before 
1845  and  the  opinion  prevailed  that  it  had  been  destroyed,  per- 
haps through  being  used  in  the  construction  of  the  wharf  near- 
by. Its  rediscovery  was  first  announced  by  Miller  in  a  paper 
which  he  read  on  March  17,  1874,  in  which  he  says  that  he 
visited  the  rock  for  the  first  time  "last  autumn." 

It  seems  clear,  then,  that  1873  was  the  year  in  which  the 
discovery  was  made.  A  record  of  1877  shows  that  by  then  it 
had  become  known  as  "Northmen's  Rock."  Neither  of  the 
writers  of  1880  mention  this  name.  If  it  was  applied  earlier, 
it  certainly  must  have  originated  later  than  1837,  the  date  of 
appearance  of  Antiquitates  AmericancB ,  to  which  is  due  the 
earliest  hint  that  there  had  ever  been  Northmen  in  this  vicinity. 
No  further  incidents  of  importance  mark  the  rock's  history 
until,  on  June  13,  1919,  under  the  auspices  of  the  Rhode  Island 
Citizen's  Historical  Society  (not  the  Rhode  Island  Historical 
Society),  it  was  dedicated  with  picturesque  ceremony  and  with 
appropriate  addresses,  and  was  christened  in  the  ancient  man- 
ner with  corn,  wine  and  oil,  receiving  the  name  "Lief's  Rock." 
After  our  own  conclusions  are  drawn,  we  shall  doubt  the  de- 

1  Antiquitates  Antericance,  1837,  page  403.  The  Almy  referred  to  was 
John  Almy  of  Tiverton. 


192  DIGHTON  ROCK 

sirabillty  of  the  permanent  retention  of  either  of  these  two 
names  that  have  been  given  to  it. 

The  only  attempt  that  has  ever  been  made  at  an  interpreta- 
tion of  the  word  or  words  represented  by  the  inscription  is  in 
an  ill-written  and  ignorant  pamphlet  of  1888,  by  Ernest  Fales 
of  Bristol,  who  gives  no  clue  as  to  how  he  obtains  his  absurd 
reading:  "Rock  of  safety,  and  all  the  power  of  man  cannot 
take  the  rock  from  the  place  of  its  situation."  Aside  from  this 
claim,  all  that  has  been  guessed  is  that  the  letters  exhibit  the 
name  of  the  person  who  carved  them.  There  is,  however, 
among  a  portion  of  the  writers  a  very  definite  opinion  as  to  the 
race  of  the  engraver  and  almost  the  exact  year  when  it  was 
done.  The  theory  was  first  advanced  by  Diman  when,  as  a 
youthful  student,  he  wrote  the  "Annals  of  Bristol"  in  1845. 
He  related  the  story  of  the  Norse  visits  to  America,  especially 
that  of  Thorfinn  Karlsefne  in  1007,  following  the  version  that 
had  been  given  in  Antiqiiitates  Americance.  Rafn  argued  that 
Thorfinn  had  wintered  on  the  shores  of  Mount  Hope  Bay,  and 
that  the  name  Hop,  which  he  gave  to  the  place,  was  still  pre- 
served in  the  name  of  the  hill  near  Bristol,  This  view  was 
naturally  accepted  by  Diman  in  his  school-boy  days,  and  he 
believed  the  rock  to  be  "the  only  trace  which  has  been  left  by 
the  Northmen  of  their  wintering  in  Bristol ;"  but  in  his  maturer 
years  he  became  and  remained  exceedingly  doubtful  as  to  its 
truth. 

Both  Miller  and  Munro  relate  the  circumstances  under 
which  they  believe  that  the  work  may  have  been  done.  The 
former  ascribes  it  to  one  of  the  party  of  Bjarne  Grimalfson,  a 
commander  in  Thorfinn's  expedition,  who,  sacrificing  himself 
for  one  of  his  crew,  stayed  behind  with  others  in  a  worm- 
eaten  ship  and  probably  "perished  among  the  worms."  The 
latter  gives  the  probable  story  in  these  words : 

It  is  easy  to  conjecture  in  what  manner  the  record  was  made. 
As  the  boat  of  the  Northmen  approached  the  shore,  when  the  tide 
was  almost  at  the  flood,  the  broad,  flat  surface  of  the  rock  pre- 
sented itself  invitingly  to  their  feet  amid  the  surrounding  boulders 
that  covered  most  of  the  shore.  When  the  party  set  out  to  explore 
the  surrounding  country  one  of  their  number  was  left  in  charge 


THE  MOUNT  HOPE  ROCK  193 

of  the  boat.  As  the  tide  went  down  he  seated  himself  upon  the 
rock  with  his  battle-axe  in  his  hand,  and  amused  himself  by  cut- 
ting his  name  and  the  figure  of  his  boat  upon  its  surface. 

Besides  the  two  men  just  mentioned,  a  few  others  have 
espoused  the  cause  of  the  Northmen.  William  A.  Slade  spoke 
of  the  rock  guardedly  in  1898  as  having  "a  certain  value  as 
cumulative  evidence."  Thomas  W.  Bicknell  said  something 
closely  similar  in  his  history  of  Barrington.  The  latter  again 
supported  the  Norse  hypothesis  a  short  time  before  the  dedica- 
tion of  the  rock  on  June  13,  1919,  in  a  communication  to  the 
Bristol  Phoenix.  So  also,  judging  from  the  brief  newspaper 
reports,  did  the  speakers  at  the  exercises  on  that  occasion.  But 
the  warmest  advocates  of  the  view  concede  that  their  belief 
rests  solely  on  the  absence  of  convincing  proof  against  it,  and 
on  local  pride  and  the  romantic  appeal  of  the  story.  "We  may 
please  ourselves  with  the  fancy,"  said  Diman  doubtfully;  and 
"a  halo  of  romance  will  surround  these  shores"  if  we  do  so. 
"Imagination  delights  to  connect  it  with  the  visits  of  the  North- 
men," is  the  strongest  reason  that  Professor  Munro  ventures 
to  express ;  and  he  puts  the  whole  matter  admirably  in  his  latest 
statement :  "Around  Mount  Hope  the  legends  of  the  Norsemen 
cluster,  shadowy,  vague,  elusive,  and  yet  altogether  fascinating. 
Only  legends  they  are  and  must  remain."  It  is,  then,  the  poet's 
voice  alone  which  is  raised  in  behalf  of  Norse  visitors  to  these 
shores ;  as,  for  example,  in  the  following  by  Bishop  Howe,  read 
at  the  Bi-Centennial  of  Bristol  in  1881 : 

Here  in  dim  days  of  yore — 

Six  centuries  before 

Saxons  sailed  these  waters  o'er; 

Norsemen  found  haven ! 
Tread  we  historic  ground, 
Where,  on  the  shores  around, 
Records  of  them  are  found 

On  the  rock  graven. 

Thomas  W.  Higginson  wrote  briefly  of  this  rock  in  1882, 
taking  his  descriptions  from  Diman  and  from  Miller  and  re- 
producing  Miller's   drawing.      He   thought   that   the  picture 


194  DIGHTON  ROCK 

showed  little  resemblance  to  a  Norse  boat,  and  that  the  apparent 
letters  were  "an  idle  combination  of  lines  and  angles.  .  .  .  All 
these  supposed  Norse  remains  must  be  ruled  out  of  the  ques- 
tion." The  writer  of  the  article  "Vineland"  in  Harper's  En- 
cyclopcedia  of  United  States  History,  in  1901,  exhibits  a  curi- 
ous inconsistency.  On  page  76  he  gives  Miller's  drawing  without 
textual  comment,  and  entitles  it  "Old  Norse  Inscription;" 
but  in  his  text  on  page  70  he  tells  us  that  "no  genuine  Norse 
remains  have  ever  been  discovered  in  New  England."  In  1904 
our  rock  is  again  mentioned,  by  Edgar  M.  Bacon  in  his 
Narragansett  Bay.  The  author  gives  more  space  to  an  absurd 
estimate  of  the  rapidity  with  which  the  rock's  surface  is  wear- 
ing away  than  to  anything  else.  Relying  on  statements  that  are 
in  themselves  incorrect,  he  uncritically  claims  that  the  rate  of 
destruction  on  Dighton  Rock,  roughly  stated,  is  a  half  inch 
in  a  century ;  and  that  this  rock,  being  much  softer,  is  wearing 
more  rapidly.  "I  have  several  times  examined  the  Mount  Hope 
Bay  rock  within  the  past  five  years  and  I  find  the  change  very 
marked — there  is  hardly  anything  left  of  it."  Such  a  convic- 
tion is  merely  a  common  yet  mistaken  psychological  impression. 
Bacon  makes  a  genuine  contribution  in  his  new  and  valuable 
drawing.  As  to  the  origin  of  the  inscription,  he  says  merely 
that  the  Norse  claim  is  not  proven — but  likewise  is  not  dis- 
proven. 

Although  Babcock  thinks  it  probable  that  the  Norse  voy- 
agers reached  Narragansett  Bay,  yet  he  holds  that  "there  is  not 
a  single  known  record  or  relic  of  any  Norse  or  Icelandic  voyage 
of  discovery  extant  at  this  time  on  American  soil,  which  may 
be  relied  on  with  any  confidence."  He  inspected  the  Mount 
Hope  rock  in  1910.  The  outline  of  the  boat  reminds  him,  not 
of  a  Norse  bark,  or  Indian's  canoe,  but  of  a  modern  white  man's 
boat  with  its  bow  uplifted  and  its  stern  set  low  in  the  water. 
Some  characters  are  gone  from  the  stone  and  all  the  others  have 
been  damaged.  Only  the  boat  remains  unhurt,  though  shallow. 
After  reminding  us  that  Indians  often  made  drawings  on  rocks, 
including  random  grooves  and  scratches  and  idle  depictions  of 
objects,  he  draws  his  final  conclusion :  "The  tendency  to  find 
something  esoteric  or  at  least  very  meaningful  in  every  chance 


THE  MOUNT  HOPE  ROCK  195 

bit  of  native  rock-scratching  has  been  a  delusion  and  a  snare. 
The  proximity  of  the  boulder  to  Mount  Hope  seems  to  mark 
this  queer  relic  as  almost  certainly  Wampanoag  work."  Du- 
buque also  attributes  it  to  the  Wampanoags,  "probably  to 
commemorate  the  event  of  some  great  conflict  among  hostile 
Indian  tribes." 

It  has  been  argued  that  the  characters  on  the  rock  resemble 
runes.  It  needs  only  an  actual  comparison  of  them  with  the 
well-known  forms  of  the  runic  alphabet  to  establish  the  fact 
that  this  is  not  true.  Again,  it  is  said  that  the  characters  bear 
the  appearance  of  being  very  ancient.  But  we  have  seen 
abundant  evidence  in  the  case  of  Dighton  Rock  that  this  would 
be  true  of  any  rather  shallow  marks  cut  into  that  kind  of  rock, 
within  a  relatively  short  time  after  their  formation.  The 
argument  that  the  inscription  must  be  old,  because  Indians 
could  give  no  account  of  it  when  the  white  settlers  first  arrived, 
is  pure  assumption;  for  no  one  knows  anything  about  it  so 
early  as  that.  The  first  rumor  that  there  was  such  a  rock  is 
that  of  1835,  and  is  unreliable,  for  reasons  given  later.  Diman 
remarked  of  it  in  1845  only  that  "it  is  said  to  have  been"  ex- 
istent. It  is  not  again  mentioned  until  1874,  when  for  the  first 
time  the  "earliest  settlers"  appear.  It  is  an  interesting  psycho- 
logical question  as  to  how  long  a  time  would  be  required  to 
create  the  impression  of  an  indefinitely  remote  antiquity, — 
how  long  it  takes  to  produce  a  tradition  of  "long  long  ago." 
A  few  examples  will  show  that  the  time  required  is  very  brief. 
One  writer  said  about  1880:  "Popular  conjecture  has  always 
associated  it  with  the  visits  of  the  Northmen."  But  this 
"always"  cannot  mean  more  than  about  forty  years ;  for  it  was 
not  until  1837  that  the  first  suggestion  was  made  that  the 
Northmen  ever  saw  Rhode  Island's  shores.  Exactly  the  same 
sort  of  statement  has  been  made  concerning  Dighton  Rock: 
"Its  inscriptions  have  always  been  thought  to  have  been  made 
by  the  Norsemen."^  Within  less  than  fifteen  years  after  Rafn's 
first  announcement  in  1840  that  the  Newport  mill  was  Norse, 
a  writer  in  Putnam's  Magazine  spoke  of  it  and  Dighton  Rock 
as  "monuments  which  tradition  has  immemorially  ascribed  to 

2  Taunton  Gazette,  May  3,  1905,  p.  9. 


196  DIGHTON  ROCK 

the  handiwork  of  the  Northmen."  As  to  the  Mount  Hope 
traditions,  people  now  living,  I  am  told,  received  them  from  old 
persons  to  whom  they  had  been  related  by  their  grandfathers  or 
other  old  people;  and  Dr.  Doringh  heard  of  the  rock  from  an 
old  resident  who  saw  it  when  he  was  a  boy,  having  had  it 
pointed  out  to  him  by  an  old  man.  Miller  calculates  that  this 
involves  a  sure  period  of  fully  a  hundred  years  prior  to  1873. 
But  these  facts  might  still  be  true  if  the  rock  had  first  been  seen 
about  1835  or  1840.  It  is  well  to  realize  that  no  actual  fact  is 
included  in  any  form  of  the  tradition  as  I  have  heard  or  read 
of  it  that  necessarily  carries  us  back  to  an  earlier  date,  and  that 
statements  about  knowledge  by  earliest  settlers  and  lack  of 
knowledge  on  the  part  of  Indians  have  been  repeatedly  made 
concerning  Dighton  Rock  and  are  provably  mistaken.  One  or 
two  persons  might  have  seen  the  inscription  about  1835,  and 
reported  it  as  composed  of  strange  characters.  Rumors  of  the 
curiosity  spread,  but  the  location  of  the  rock  was  forgotten; 
and  when  the  Norse  theory  of  Dighton  Rock  became  known, 
about  1840,  this  mysterious  rock  also  would  naturally  have  been 
attributed  to  the  same  source.  Thus  Diman's  statement  in  1845 
would  be  accounted  for,  even  though  the  characters  had  been 
carved  not  more  than  ten  or  twenty  years  before.  Within  the 
next  twenty  years,  following  the  example  set  by  Dighton  Rock, 
it  would  become  easy  for  the  memory  of  old  people  to  assure 
them  that  the  inscription  had  been  seen  at  some  indefinite  time 
and  therefore  long  before  Diman's  mention  of  it,  and  for  the 
early  settlers  and  the  ignorant  Indians  to  be  introduced  into  the 
accounts  because,  if  the  writing  was  really  old  and  unaccount- 
able, these  facts  also  must  have  been  true.^  The  rumor  of  1835, 
purporting  to  date  from  1780,  cannot  be  regarded  as  evidence 
against  these  suppositions.     It  is  highly  probable  that  Almy's 

^  This  is  an  interesting  example  of  the  not  uncommon  logical  error  of 
"putting  the  cart  before  the  horse"  and  of  "arguing  in  a  circle."  It  begins, 
not  long  before  1845,  in  this  form :  "The  inscription  is  old,  because  known 
by  vague  rumor  only,  and  in  unreadable  characters ;  therefore  it  must  have 
been  seen  by  the  earliest  settlers,  have  been  a  mystery  to  the  Indians,  and 
have  been  another  example  of  Norse  carving."  It  gradually  becomes  trans- 
formed into  the  argument  used  by  later  writers :  "It  was  seen  by  the  early 
settlers  and  was  unexplainable  by  the  Indians;  therefore  it  is  very  old,  and 
of  Norse  origin." 


THE  MOUNT  HOPE  ROCK  197 

memory  was  at  fault  in  this  instance.  Stiles  was  in  the  habit 
of  entering  in  his  Itineraries  notes  concerning  every  rumored 
inscription-rock  that  was  brought  to  his  attention,  and  he  visited 
and  made  drawings  of  every  one  that  he  could  locate.  Yet  his 
notes  contain  no  allusion  to  any  near  Mount  Hope.  I  conclude 
that  probably  Stiles  had  never  heard  of  one  there  and  had  men- 
tioned to  Almy  a  rock  at  some  other  place.  The  fifty-five  years 
that  had  elapsed  before  he  spoke  of  the  matter  to  Webb  would 
easily  account  for  the  error  in  Almy's  impression;  and  we 
shall  meet  later  yet  another  instance  of  his  tendency  to  confuse 
localities. 

I  am  inclined,  therefore,  to  set  1835  as  the  earliest  date  at 
which  we  can  be  sure  that  the  inscription  was  in  existence.  It 
seems  to  me  significant  that  William  E.  Richmond  published 
a  long  poem  on  "Mount  Hope"  in  1818,  devoting  three  pages 
of  verse  and  ten  pages  of  notes  to  Dighton  Rock,  but  without 
mention  of  this  nearer  curiosity.  He  had  certainly  never  heard 
of  it,  and,  since  he  apparently  knew  the  region  intimately,  this 
may  argue  that  the  inscription  there  had  not  yet  been  made. 

Similarly  unsound  is  the  argument  that  the  record  cannot 
have  been  made  by  Indians,  because  they  had  no  written  lan- 
guage. For  Indians  of  the  time  of  the  first  settlers  and  earlier 
this  is  true.  But  in  Colonial  times  the  case  was  different.  A 
Micmac  system  of  hieroglyphics  developed,  many  Indians  were 
taught  to  write  English  or  at  least  to  affix  their  "marks"  or 
signatures  to  official  papers,  and  there  is  some  slight  evidence, 
to  be  examined  in  a  later  chapter,  that  a  native  system  of  sym- 
bolic characters  may  have  been  coming  into  use  in  this  locality 
before  King  Philip's  war.  Moreover,  in  1821  an  uneducated 
Cherokee,*  analyzing  his  language  into  eighty-six  syllables, 
devised  a  separate  and  fixed  character  for  each.  The  result  was 
easy  to  learn  and  his  whole  tribe  was  soon  making  use  of  it. 
Before  concluding  that  Indians  cannot  have  been  the  authors 
of  our  puzzle,  we  must  first  make  sure  that  it  cannot  be  ex- 
plained as  having  been  written  in  one  or  another  of  these 
systems. 

The  following  Table  will  help  to  a  decision. 

*  George  Guess,  known  also  as  Sequoyah. 


198 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


1 

£.3 

4 

6 

6 

7 

8 

9 

1.  Miller 

/ 

K 

^ 

^ 

y 

A 

^ 

N/    •• 

2,  Uunro 

/ 

fA 

7/ 

A 

7 

a 

e 

3.   Baoon 

• 

-A4 

^ 

4' 

\ 

Y 

R 

c- 

4.  Chapln 

A\ 

7^ 

^ 

A 

y- 

[? 

e 

B.  Delabarr© 

; 

M 

7 

\ 

> 

A 

(r 

6.  Cherokee 

/ 

7/ 

R 

Oi 

A 

y 

R 

& 

7.  Photograph 

0^ 

^>^ 

¥ 

^\ 

^ 

y 

E 

tr 

8.  Warren 

-1 

V 

> 

|3 

9.  New  Jersey 

1 

A 

"-'^ 

^ 

J 

X 

( 

i'/^^^ 

10*  Tennessee 

i 

Ac 

7 

\> 

■J 

^ 

^ 

s 

Figure  42 — Versions  of  the  Mount  Hope  Inscription  and  Comparison 
with  Other  Indian  Writings.^ 


The  presence  of  natural  cracks,  the  scaHng  off  of  parts  of 
the  rock's  surface,  and  the  wear  and  tear  of  the  letters,  make  it 
impossible  to  be  sure  exactly  how  the  original  inscription 
looked.  For  this  reason  the  first  five  lines  of  the  Table  present 
versions  of  it  as  seen  by  five  independent  observers.  They  are 
closely  similar,  but  not  identical.  The  first  three  are  from  the 
published  drawings.  The  fourth  was  made  by  Howard  M. 
Chapin  on  May  23,  1919,  and  the  fifth  by  myself  on  August  5, 
1919.  These  last  two  are  confessedly  hurried  impressions 
without  pretense  to  critical  study,  but  are  useful,  nevertheless, 
as  showing  how  the  characters  may  be  seen.    With  these  should 

s  Since  the  characters  of  this  Table  had  to  be  drawn  free-hand,  they 
are  of  course  not  photographically  faithful  to  their  originals.  Those  of  the 
sixth  line  follow  sometimes  the  model  of  the  U.  S.  Doc.  No.  135,  sometimes 
that  of  Pilling.  The  order  of  the  characters  of  the  last  three  lines  is  not 
that  of  their  originals,  it  being  desired  to  place  each  underneath  that  charac- 
ter of  the  Mount  Hope  inscription  which  it  most  nearly  resembles. 


THE  MOUNT  HOPE  ROCK  199 

be  compared  the  photograph  of  the  inscription,  which  offers  the 
best  means  for  studying  its  exact  appearance;  but  care  must 
be  taken  not  to  mistake  natural  cracks  for  artificial  lines.  In 
the  sixth  line  of  the  table  are  presented  those  characters  of  the 
Cherokee  syllabary  which  most  nearly  resemble  the  Mount 
Hope  inscription.  In  the  three  lowest  lines  are  shown  the  char- 
acters on  three  Indian  stones  that  are  to  receive  attention  later. 
Concerning  them  it  is  sufficient  to  remark  that  a  general  resem- 
blance can  be  discerned,  enough  to  suggest  that,  if  these  three 
are  Indian,  the  one  near  Mount  Hope  may  be  Indian  also. 
They  cannot  help  us,  however,  to  read  what  is  written. 

Returning  now  to  the  Cherokee  characters,  we  shall  find 
that  they  offer  a  possible  solution  of  our  enigma.  At  first  sight 
they  seem  too  different  from  those  of  the  stone  to  admit  the 
possibility  of  the  latter  having  been  intended  to  represent  the 
former.  But  careful  study  of  the  photograph  proves  that  the 
resemblance  may  really  be  accepted  as  greater  than  the  drawings 
hitherto  made  would  suggest.  A  few  lines  are  clear  in  the  pho- 
tograph, and  others  can  be  faintly  seen  if  looked  for,  whose 
presence  no  one  has  suspected  before.  Some  show  very  clearly 
and  have  always  been  drawn  as  artificial,  which  may,  neverthe- 
less, be  cracks  or  other  accidents.  Adopting  an  attitude  as 
favorable  as  possible  in  these  respects,  line  7  of  the  table  may 
be  found  in  the  photograph.  It  shows  indubitable  lines  heavily 
drawn,  faintly  observable  ones  more  lightly  traced ;  while  those 
that  are  clear  yet  are  to  be  rejected  are  indicated  by  dimly  drawn 
dotted  lines.  To  accept  this  as  the  correct  interpretation  in- 
volves only  slight  departures  from  what  the  draughtsmen  from 
the  rock  have  seen  and  depicted.  We  have  to  add  but  very  little 
to  what  one  or  more  of  them  have  seen :  the  horizontal  line  over 
character  2  and  the  short  horizontal  line  of  3,  both  of  which 
appear  clearly  in  the  photograph ;  the  whole  of  5  ;  and  the  short 
and  uncertain  up-curve  at  the  bottom  of  7.  From  what  has 
been  unanimously  accepted  heretofore  we  have  to  omit  as  im- 
perfections only  a  curved  diagonal  line  running  down  to  the 
right  from  the  middle  of  3,  and  the  long  horizontal  line  running 
leftward  from  the  top  of  4  which  simply  is  here  made  to  share 
the  fate  of  the  always  rejected  similar  horizontal  running  left- 


200  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ward  from  6.  Unusual  features  that  nevertheless  have  been 
given  already  by  one  or  two  observers  are  the  up-curve  at  the 
bottom  of  1,  the  separation  of  2  and  3,  the  R-shape  of  8,  and 
the  curved  form  of  9.  The  last  is  easily  seen  if  we  follow  with 
the  eye  the  right  side,  not  the  left  side,  of  the  lines  composing 
the  letter.  The  fifth  character  occupies  a  position  where  the 
surface  of  the  rock  has  scaled  away.  But  we  shall  see,  when 
studying  Mark  Rock,  that  even  where  this  happens  it  does  not 
necessarily  destroy  altogether  marks  which  were  carved  in  the 
original  surface.  They  may  continue  to  be  legible  under  favor- 
able conditions  of  lighting.  The  photograph  shows  faint  traces 
of  the  character  here  in  the  form  that  is  given  in  the  Table,  and 
careful  study  of  the  rock  itself  convinces  me  that  the  reading 
is  justified. 

It  demands,  therefore,  no  great  credulity  to  believe  that  line 
7  may  be  a  correct  restoration  of  what  was  actually  written. 
Its  differences  from  line  6  are  very  slight.  Character  2  is 
reversed,  but  evidently  the  same — a  very  common  error  of  chil- 
dren and  ill-educated  persons;  4  is  a  little  unconformable  in 
shape,  but  unmistakable;  6  is  badly  drawn,  but  almost  solely 
through  having  its  short  diagonal  directed  wrongly.  It  is  al- 
ways much  harder  to  remember  accurately  the  forms  of  letters 
in  writing  them  than  it  is  to  recognize  them  in  reading ;  and  a 
man  of  little  education,  without  having  his  book  at  hand  for 
guidance,  would  naturally  have  made  many  mistakes  in  attempt- 
ing to  draw  these  eighty-six  characters.  Even  fairly  educated 
white  men  do  not  always  remember  the  correct  shapes  of  their 
own  twenty-six  letters;  one  of  them  has  recently  inscribed  a 
date  on  this  same  rock,  with  the  lower  curve  of  a  J  turned  the 
wrong  way.  Most  of  the  characters  of  the  inscription  more 
nearly  resemble  Cherokee  symbols  than  any  other  specific  alpha- 
bet, in  spite  of  not  corresponding  exactly.  In  fact,  I  think 
that  we  may  say  that  seven  of  the  nine  characters  are  practically 
sure;  but  if  so,  then  5  and  6,  the  only  uncertain  ones,  must  be 
accepted  with  them,  because  taken  thus  the  line  now  conveys  a 
discoverable  meaning. 

The  Cherokee  syllables  of  line  6  are  pronounced,  in  Chero- 
kee, as  follows : 


THE  MOUNT  HOPE  ROCK  201 

Mu-ti-ho-ge-me-di-mu-sv-quv. 

The  g  approaches  k  in  sound,  and  the  d  approaches  t.  The  v 
is  a  short  u  strongly  nazaHzed.^  Now  it  is  not  impossible,  as 
we  shall  see,  that  a  New  England  Indian  inscribed  these  symbols 
some  time  between  1825  and  1835.  H  he  was  depicting  syllables 
of  an  Algonkian  language  by  means  of  symbols  devised  for 
Cherokee  sounds,  he  would  have  had  to  select  the  nearest  resem- 
blances, not  having  exact  equivalents.  The  place  where  these 
occur  gives  a  sure  clue  as  to  their  meaning.  The  first  part  can 
stand  for  nothing  else  than  "Metahocometi"  or,  as  we  more 
familiarly  know  it,  "Metacomet."  The  mn  which  follows 
naturally  unites  with  the  ^  of  the  next  syllable,  becoming  miis-, 
one  of  the  forms  to  which  Trumbull  assigns  the  meaning 
"great,"  The  final  word  is  evidently  sachem ; — saunchem  is  the 
Wampanoag  form  of  it  which  John  Dan  forth  wrote  in  1680. 
The  syllable  ho,  I  am  informed,  has  an  intensive  effect  in  Al- 
gonkin.  The  whole,  then,  will  have  been  intended  to  read: 
Great  Metacomet,  Chief  Sachem. 

Who  could  possibly  have  written  such  a  record  on  this  ob- 
scure rock,  in  Wampanoag  dialect  but  in  Cherokee  letters,  long 
after  Indians  had  ceased  to  live  in  this  region?  The  question, 
of  course,  cannot  be  answered  with  entire  certainty.  Never- 
theless, it  is  not  difficult  to  reconstruct  plausibly  the  circum- 
stances under  which  the  inscription  may  have  been  made. 

It  is  a  matter  of  record  that  a  party  of  Penobscot  Indians 
visited  Warren  and  vicinity  in  1860.  There  seems  to  be  con- 
vincing evidence  in  local  tradition  that  one  or  more  other  parties 
of  them  had  been  there  in  previous  years,  and  there  is  fairly 
strong  indication  that  such  visits  were  made  as  early  as  1830 
or  1835.  Again,  it  is  known  that  a  party  of  Penobscots  was  in 
Cambridge  in  the  winter  of  1833-1834,  and  they  may  well  have 
come  to  Warren  also  in  one  or  the  other  of  those  two  years  and 
thus  have  been  responsible  for  the  origin  of  the  local  traditions. 
In  the  third  place,  there  was  living  in  Massachusetts  at  the  time 
a  Cherokee  Indian,  more  or  less  of  a  wanderer,  married  into  the 
family  of  descendants  of  the  Wampanoag  Chiefs, 

^  The  earliest  authority,  the  U.  S.  Doc.  135,  instead  of  ge  gives  keh; 
for  di  gives  tee;  and  for  the  last  two  syllables :  sahn-qiihn. 


202  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Thomas  C.  Mitchell  was  a  half -blooded  Indian,  born  in 
1795,  whose  mother  was  Patapsico,  a  native  Cherokee,  and 
whose  father  was  an  Englishman.  At  an  early  age  he  became 
a  sea- faring  man.  It  is  not  known  whether  or  not  he  ever  re- 
turned home  for  a  time  and  learned  the  Cherokee  manner  of 
writing,  but  this  is  a  not  remote  possibility.  He  was  living  in 
Charlestown  and  North  Abington  in  the  years  between  1828 
and  1835.  When  the  party  of  Penobscots,  who  encamped  in 
Cambridge  in  the  winter  of  1833-'34,  visited  Warren,  as  they 
probably  did,  he  may  well  have  gone  with  them,  for  he  would 
naturally  have  been  interested  in  Indians  who  came  to  his 
vicinity ;  or  he  may  have  gone  independently  at  about  the  same 
time,  which  I  regard  as  less  probable.  He  had  married  into  a 
family  that  was  proud  of  its  descent  from  Massasoit  and  that 
had  great  reverence  for  King  Philip;  and  he  himself,  as  his 
daughter  Charlotte,  or  Wootonekanuske,  informs  me,  "thought 
that  King  Philip  was  a  great  man."  His  knowledge  of  Chero- 
kee, and  his  visit  to  Warren  and  Bristol,  are  matters  of  con- 
jecture, it  is  true.  But  they  are  not  at  all  improbable,  for,  in 
the  first  place,  the  above-mentioned  known  facts  make  him  an 
exceedingly  likely  person  to  have  carved  the  inscription;  and, 
moreover,  he  seems  to  have  had  a  restless  and  wandering  spirit, 
indicated  by  the  fact  that,  as  his  daughter  expressed  it,  "he  used 
to  stay  at  home  sometimes  for  two  or  three  years  at  a  time,  and 
then  go  off  on  a  sailing  trip  again."  Unless,  then,  some  positive 
evidence  in  favor  of  another  view  develops,  I  am  convinced  that 
it  is  so  highly  probable  as  to  amount  nearly  to  certainty,  that 
the  inscription  on  the  Mount  Hope  rock  was  written  in  Chero- 
kee symbols  and  Wampanoag  words  by  Thomas  C.  Mitchell, 
in  or  about  1834. 

In  view  of  the  condition  of  the  rock  and  the  departure  from 
life  of  everyone  who  could  possibly  have  known  the  circum- 
stances, it  is  exceedingly  unlikely  that  the  exact  truth  can  ever 
be  established  beyond  question.  There  are  three  strong  points 
in  favor  of  our  hypothesis :  five  of  the  characters,  perhaps 
seven,  are  almost  surely  Cherokee ;  adding  to  them  two  less  cer- 
tain ones,  they  make  definite  and  appropriate  sense ;  and  we  can 
account  for  their  being  there,  in  a  manner  consistent  with  all 


THE  MOUNT  HOPE  ROCK  203 

the  known  facts.  Any  one  of  these  alone  might  leave  us  in  seri- 
ous doubt.  The  three  taken  together  make  an  exceedingly 
strong  case. 

If  we  accept  the  new  interpretation,  even  though  hesitantly 
and  doubtfully,  and  lose  the  halo  of  antiquity,  we  do  not  rele- 
gate all  the  poetry  and  romance  to  acknowledged  fictions.  It 
clings  abundantly  to  the  realities  themselves.  What  can  be 
more  romantic,  what  a  more  inspiring  theme  for  poets,  than  the 
actual  facts,  if  our  story  be  indeed  true?  Amid  these  indented 
shores  and  wooded  hills  once  roamed  a  free  and  happy  people 
• — "kind  and  gentle;  the  finest  looking  tribe,  and  the  hand- 
somest in  their  costumes,  that  we  have  found  in  our  voyage," — 
so  Verrazano  wrote  of  them  in  1524.  Dark  days  came  upon 
them  which  never  ended.  Displaced  by  an  alien  people,  their 
broad  lands  tricked  away  from  them,  they  were  degraded, 
wronged,  subdued.  An  irremediable  incompatibility  in  ideals, 
in  temperament,  in  unalterable  manner  of  life,  without  serious 
fault  on  the  part  of  either,  made  it  impossible  for  the  two  races 
to  live  together  in  peace.  It  was  the  working  of  unhappy  fate 
for  the  one  that  inevitably  had  to  yield  and  vanish.  Yet  before 
it  yielded  utterly,  under  the  leadership  of  a  brave  man,  it  made 
a  last  despairing,  heroic,  vain  attempt  to  save  itself.  Thereafter 
there  was  nothing  left  for  its  disappearing  remnants  but  tame 
submission  and  memories  of  a  greater  past.  The  two  monu- 
ments of  Mount  Hope  in  their  sharp  contrast  are  a  fitting 
memorial  of  this  tragic  story.  At  the  summit,  carved  in  stone, 
is  the  name  "King  Philip,"  unveiled  amid  impressive  cere- 
monies, erected  tardily  by  the  conquering  and  self-styled  su- 
perior race,  as  a  tribute  to  a  great  man  who,  had  he  succeeded, 
would  have  been  a  Washington  to  his  people.  On  the  shore 
at  the  base  of  the  Mount  is  a  humbler  and  more  pathetic  stone, 
on  which  someone,  silently  and  alone,  engraved  an  epitaph  to 
his  dying  race  and  its  vanished  hopes,  symbolized  in  the  name 
of  its  unhappy  hero:  Great  Metacomet,  Chief  Sachem. 


204 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


''rip^ 


Figure   43 — Drawings   of    Portsmouth    Inscriptions   by    Ezra    Stiles,    June 
17,  1767,  from  his  Itineraries,  ii,  265. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE    ISLAND    OF    RHODE  ISLAND 

1.  The  Portsmouth  Rocks. — There  was  once  a  group  of 
inscribed  rocks  in  the  town  of  Portsmouth,  on  the  Island  of 
Rhode  Island,  that  are  now  irretrievably  lost.  Fortunately  they 
were  thoroughly  studied  before  their  disappearance  by  two  dif- 
ferent observers  and  careful  drawings  of  them  were  made. 
They  were  described  in  1835  by  Dr.  Webb  as  follows : 

The  rocks  are  situated  on  the  western  side  of  the  island  of 
Rhode  Island,  in  the  town  of  Portsmouth,  on  the  shore,  bordering 
the  farm  formerly  belonging  to  Job  Almy,  but  now  the  property 
of  William  Almy  of  Providence,  about  seven  miles  from  Newport, 
taking  the  western  road,  and  four  miles  from  Bristol  Ferry.  They 
are  partially,  if  not  entirely,  covered  by  water,  at  high  tide.  They 
were  formerly  well  covered  with  characters,  although  a  large  por- 
tion of  them  have  become  obliterated  by  the  action  of  air  and 
moisture,  and  probably  still  more  by  the  attrition  of  masses  of 
stone  against  them  in  violent  storms  and  gales,  and  by  the  ravages 
of  that  most  destructive  power  of  all,  the  hand  of  man.  The  rocks 
are,  geologically,  similar  to  that  at  Assonet  neck ;  being  fine  grained 
Gray-wacke.  The  Inscriptions  were  made  in  the  same  manner, 
as  that  on  the  Assonet  Neck  rock;  viz.  by  being  pecked  in  upon 
the  rocks.  Some  individuals  have  very  recently  drawn,  probably 
with  pitchforks,  circles  all  over  the  original  marks.  Some  of  the 
characters  are  similar  to  the  Assonet  ones.  One  head  of  a  human 
figure  could  just  be  distinguished  on  a  rock,  from  which  the  other 
characters  were  so  far  obliterated  as  to  prevent  their  being  made 
out;  on  another,  some  irregular  quadrilateral  and  angular  ones 
could  be  faintly  traced. 

Reference  to  the  section  of  chart  in  Figure  50  will  show 
that  the  position  described  by  Webb  is  occupied  by  the  plant  of 
the  United  States  naval  coal  depot  at  a  place  now  called  Mel- 

205 


206  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ville  Station  but  formerly  known  as  Portsmouth  Grove  and 
later  as  Bradford. 

The  earliest  visitor  to  these  rocks  of  whom  we  know  was 
Ezra  Stiles.  He  went  first  on  June  17,  1767,  and  found  "their 
Inscriptions  of  the  same  kind  as  those  at  Assonet,  tho  not  so 
distinct  &  well  done."  Drawings  were  made  from  four  rocks, 
one  of  them  from  two  sides.  In  regard  to  the  latter  he  re- 
marks :  "A  &  B  are  two  sides  of  the  same  stone  about  6  feet 
long  &  3  f.  broad.  The  prikt  lines  denote  Cracks."  The  five 
drawings  are  reproduced  in  our  Figures  43  and  44. 

He  went  again  to  inspect  the  rocks  on  October  6,  1767. 
One  of  his  sketches  shows  the  entire  vicinity  of  Coggeshall's 
Point,  with  various  distances  exactly  measured  and  recorded. 
Another  is  a  plan,  on  an  enlarged  scale,  of  the  rocks  in  their 
relation  to  one  another  and  to  the  shore.  Three  pages  contain 
drawings  of  the  inscriptions  on  the  three  principal  rocks.  These 
five  depictions  appear  in  our  Figures  45  to  49.  On  the  first 
chart,  one  of  the  notes  is  so  near  the  edge  as  to  be  illegible  in 
the  reproduction :  "Low  water  mark  makes  shore  20  or  30  feet 
broad ;"  and  another  is  of  especial  interest :  "This  point  for- 
merly a  place  of  Indian  Wigwaums  but  now  none."  His  rock 
A  of  this  occasion  is  the  same  as  the  one  which  he  called  No.  3 
at  the  former  visit.  It  is  divided  into  squares,  indicating 
dimensions  in  feet.  Beneath  it  is  an  enlarged  sketch  of  one  of 
the  figures.  Rock  B  is  identical  with  his  previous  No.  2.  Both 
sides  of  it  which  bear  inscriptions  are  copied.  The  side  previ- 
ously called  A  is  drawn  in  ink,  and  a  faint  note  in  pencil  on  it 
shows  that  this  side  faces  "East  a  little  S°."  The  previously 
designated  side  B  of  rock  No.  2  is  here  called  "N°  Side"  of  rock 
B.  It  is  drawn  hurriedly  and  in  pencil.  The  right-hand  half  of 
the  upper  line  in  the  first  of-  the  two  drawings  from  this  rock 
B  was  again  drawn  with  greater  care  and  on  a  larger  scale, 
with  dimensions  indicated.  It  seems  hardly  important  enough 
to  need  reproduction.  Rock  C  of  this  occasion  is  his  previous 
No.  1.  Its  upper  half  contains  two  diamonds  and  a  cross  which 
so  interested  him  that  he  laid  three  pages  of  his  Itinerary 
against  them  on  the  rock  and  traced  them  exactly  in  full  size. 
These  three  figures,  also,  we  have  not  reproduced,  since  they 


[26 
16       '    Cnu  sti 


;^^c^(#*r  ii-ri 


Fig.  50.     Chart  of  the  vicinity  of  the  former  Portsmouth  rocks  situated 
where  the  wharves  of  the  U.  S.  Naval  Coal  Depot  now  stand 


Fig.   51.      Drawing   of   Portsmouth   inscription   "number    1,"   by   John   R. 
Bartlett,  August  10,  1835 

Facing  page  206 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND  207 


^.«,  l/J]^'^ 


{ 


Figure  44 — Drawings  of  Portsmouth  Inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  June  17, 
1767,  from  his  Itineraries,  ii,  266. 


208  DIGHTON  ROCK 


^^>%, 


Mhbm 


Figure  45— Map  by  Ezra  Stiles,  October  6,   1767,  of  the  Vicinity  of  the 
Portsmouth  Rocks,  from  his  Itineraries,  ii,  301. 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND 


209 


Figure  46— Plan  of  the  Portsmouth  Rocks  by  Ezra  Stiles,  October  6,  1767, 
from  his  Itineraries,  ii,  302. 


210 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


?li(i^    krua^^hhiC    ^p^i*xA/CL.Juffl/mL: 


\ 


Figure  47— Drawings  of   Portsmouth  Inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  October 
6,  1767,  from  his  Itineraries,  ii,  303. 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND  211 


Figure  48— Drawings  of  Portsmouth  Inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  October 
6,  1767,  from  his  Itineraries,  ii,  304. 


212 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


k«art*«M»l(Mai<U«|  i|iui  1  Jl^' 


Figure  49-Drawings  of  Portsmouth  Inscriptions  by  Ezra  Stiles,  October 
^  6,  1767,  from  his  Itineraries,  u,  305. 


/V,vV 


4^/. 


N"  i    Foi/s7na''ff 


Figs.    52,    53.       1  )ra\viiigs    of    Portsmouth    inscriptions    "numbers 
2  and  3,"  l.y  John  R.   Bartlett,   August   10.   1835 

facing  l^age  211 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND  213 

seem  to  be  sufficiently  well  presented  in  drawing  C.  The  left- 
hand  diamond  measures  3}i  by  5^  inches;  the  other,  4^  by 
6J^;  and  the  cross,  3^  by  4^^.  Underneath  the  drawing  of 
rock  C  are  a  few  penciled  tracings  whose  source  I  have  not 
identified. 

Twenty-one  years  later,  on  October  6,  1788,  Stiles  remarked 
in  his  Itinerary:  "Copied  4  Rocks  on  M^  Job  Almys  Farm." 
The  drawings  were  not  made  on  pages  of  the  Itinerary  and  are 
now  lost. 

Nearly  fifty  years  after  Stiles's  last  note  on  this  subject, 
another  study  of  these  rocks  was  made,  by  Dr.  Thomas  H. 
Webb  and  John  R.  Bartlett.  Their  first  visit  was  before  July 
20,  1835,  and  resulted  in  a  report  to  the  Trustees  of  the  Rhode 
Island  Historical  Society  and  a  letter  to  Rafn  which  has  already 
been  quoted.  They  went  there  again  on  August  10th,  and 
Webb  wrote  again  to  Rafn  on  October  31,  1835,  describing  the 
rocks  as  follows: 

No.  1  in  the  most  Northern,  and  the  characters  are  inscribed 
on  the  perpendicular  surface  of  its  Eastern  side;  No.  2  stands 
between  the  others,  and  is  inclined  to  the  S.  having  its  characters 
on  the  surface  facing  to  that  point  of  the  compass ;  such  also  is 
the  position  of  No.  3,  as  well  as  the  situation  of  the  figures  upon 
it.  These  are  not  stratified  as  some  may  conjecture  from  view- 
ing the  Drawings ;  each  is  a  single  block,  deeply  and  somewhat 
regularly  fissured.  Farther  to  the  S.  and  S.W.  are  some  smaller 
rocks  which  were  marked,  but  nothing  satisfactory  can  now  be 
distinguished  on  them. 

The  drawings  that  Bartlett  made  were  reproduced  by  Rafn 
in  Tabella  XIII  of  Antiquitates  American(E.  Originals  of 
them  are  in  possession  of  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society, 
on  sheets  of  paper  each  measuring  15^  by  19^^  inches,  and  it 
is  these  originals  that  we  reproduce.  Figures  51  to  53.  The 
Webb-Bartlett  No.  1  is  the  same  as  Stiles's  1  or  C ;  2  is  Stiles's 
2  or  B ;  and  3  is  Stiles's  3  or  A.  Thus  we  have  three  separate 
drawings  of  each  of  these  inscriptions,  and  study  and  com- 
parison of  them,  in  spite  of  their  differences,  will  give  a  fairly 
accurate  idea  of  what  the  markings  on  the  rocks  must  have  been 


214  DIGHTON  ROCK 

like.  Besides  these  three  rocks,  pictured  on  all  three  occasions, 
it  will  be  remembered  that  Stiles  twice  depicted  the  figures  on 
another  side  of  B,  and  once  made  a  drawing  from  a  fourth 
rock;  and  Webb  mentions  several  "smaller  rocks  which  were 
marked,"  from  which  Bartlett  made  no  drawings,  including  two 
of  whose  faintly  discernible  characters  he  could  barely  make 
out  a  human  head  on  one  and  some  irregular  quadrilateral  and 
angular  marks  on  the  other. 

In  addition  to  these  drawings,  there  is  a  photograph  which 
shows  the  general  appearance  of  some  of  the  rocks,  although 
it  does  not  help  much  in  regard  to  the  inscription.  It  was  taken 
in  1883  by  George  H.  Chase  of  Portsmouth,  and  is  shown  in 
Figure  54.  Mr.  Chase  says  that  the  rock  was  of  gray  slate  and 
measured  about  eight  feet  in  length  and  four  in  width,  with  a 
height  of  two  feet  at  the  upper  and  eight  inches  at  the  lower 
end.  This  was  evidently  the  rock  called  A  by  Stiles.  The 
rocks  seen  beyond  it  are  the  group  of  three  pictured  by  Stiles 
directly  to  the  west  of  A;  and  the  other  rock,  at  the  extreme 
left  of  the  photograph,  is  drawn  by  Stiles  a  little  to  the  south 
of  A.  The  zigzags  seen  by  both  Stiles  and  Webb  clearly 
marked  upon  this  rock  are  visible  in  the  photograph,  but  the 
other  markings  that  they  drew  are  too  obscure  to  be  seen. 

We  know  of  only  one  other  occasion  on  which  these  rocks 
were  seen  and  described.  Dr.  Samuel  A.  Green  visited  them 
in  1868.^  He  found  only  two  of  them,  "situated  on  the  beach 
near  the  old  landing  place  of  the  military  hospital  at  Portsmouth 
Grove."  Their  material  appeared  to  him  to  be  of  a  gneissoid 
character.  "Many  of  the  marks  are  still  distinct  and  well- 
defined,  and  perhaps  were  made  by  the  same  tribe  that  made 
those  on  Dighton  Rock.  They  are  of  interest  as  early  speci- 
mens of  rude  Indian  art."  In  1913,  William  H.  Babcock  re- 
ported that  the  rocks  seemed  to  have  disappeared.  He  says  of 
them,  however :  "Several  inscriptions,  plainly  Indian  work, 
are  found  at  the  end  of  the  Antiquitatcs  Amcricance  as  for- 
merly existent  at  this  point  and  at  Tiverton." 

Babcock's  belief  that  the  rocks  have  now  disappeared  is 
unfortunately  correct.     The  contractors  who  constructed  the 

^  Proceedings  of  the  American  Antiquarian  Society,  October  21,  1868. 


'J. 


r  20 


O   3-1 


•CO 


o^ 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND  215 

Naval  Depot  there  between  1901  and  1906  have  described  their 
work  to  me  in  such  a  way  as  to  make  it  certain  that  the  place 
where  the  rocks  are  indicated  on  Stiles's  chart  is  now  occupied 
by  wharfs,  walls  and  filling;  and  they  noticed  no  rocks  with 
inscriptions. 

Discussions  concerning  the  origin  of  these  inscriptions  have 
been  numerous ;  but  since  they  are  always  connected  with  those 
of  Tiverton,  it  will  be  well  to  postpone  examination  of  them 
until  the  latter  have  been  considered.  We  may  notice  concern- 
ing them,  however,  that  they  include  nothing  that  resembles 
alphabetic  characters,  nothing  that  suggests  even  pictographs 
symbolizing  definite  objects,  conveying  a  message  or  preserving 
a  record.  Some  of  them  may  be  the  expression  of  a  mere  rest- 
less and  aimless  desire  to  be  doing  something,  as  one  scratches 
idle  lines  in  sand  or  on  paper.  So  far  as  they  exhibit  definite 
purpose,  their  motif  appears  to  be  exclusively  decorative.  They 
must  probably  be  regarded,  therefore,  merely  as  ornamental 
lines  mingled  with  meaningless  scribblings.  If  any  of  them,  in 
addition,  symbolized  some  object  or  thought,  it  was  probably 
of  no  more  than  momentary  and  trivial  significance. 

It  is  unfortunate  that  relics  of  the  past  so  interesting  and 
important  as  these  should  have  been  suffered  to  disappear.  It 
is  much  to  be  hoped  that  a  like  fate  may  not  overtake  any  of 
those  which  remain  in  other  places.  In  this  case,  however,  the 
loss  is  less  irreparable  inasmuch  as  we  have  three  separate  and 
independent  drawings  of  each  of  the  three  most  important  in- 
scriptions, and  from  them  can  determine  with  a  high  degree  of 
probability  the  general  character  and  the  most  significant  de- 
tails of  the  incised  lines. 

2.  Fogland  Ferry. — Dr.  Stiles  believed  that  there  was  an- 
other inscribed  rock  in  Portsmouth.  On  October  6,  1788,  he 
wrote  in  his  Itinerary:  "Visited  &  copied  a  markt  Rock  about 
half  a  m.  above  Fogland  Ferry  on  Rh.I.  on  shore  ag*.  or  just 
below  Mr  McCorys  Farm."  Fogland  Ferry  ran  from  Fogland 
Point  in  Tiverton  across  to  the  island  of  Rhode  Island.  On  the 
Portsmouth  side,  its  landing  place  was  about  half  a  mile  to  the 
south  of  McCurry  Point,  shown  on  the  chart  of  Figure  57. 
This  Point  is  part  of  an  estate  still  known  as  the  McCorrie 


216  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Farms,  The  rock  was  probably  situated  just  to  the  south  of  the 
first  division  line  shown  on  the  chart  south  of  McCurry  Point, 
this  being  the  southerly  border  of  the  property.  I  have  not 
succeeded  in  finding  a  rock  with  inscriptions  on  it,  anywhere 
near  that  place. 

3.  The  Arnold's  Point  Cup  Stone. — There  is  still  another 
marked  stone  lying  on  the  shore  near  one  of  the  Portsmouth 
coal  mines,  a  little  to  the  south  of  Arnold's  Point.  Its  position 
can  be  found  on  the  chart  of  Figure  55,  about  opposite  the  fig- 
ure 3  ojff  the  shore  west  of  the  "Coal  Mine"  ;  and  its  appearance 
is  shown  in  the  photograph  of  Figure  56. 

The  rock  is  of  sandstone,  merging  somewhat  into  con- 
glomerate at  the  in-shore  end.  It  is  near  the  edge  of  the  beach 
at  low  tide,  and  is  covered  by  high  water.  It  measures  about 
3  feet  in  width,  Ayi  in  length,  and  in  thickness  from  16  to  22 
inches.  It  is  nearly  flat  and  smooth  on  top,  with  rounded  edges, 
and  a  slight  lateral  inclination  shoreward.  Its  long  axis  is 
directed  about  N.  40°  E.  Its  artificial  markings  are  unique 
among  the  inscribed  rocks  of  this  region.  They  consist  of  six 
relatively  deep  holes  or  cups,  connected  together  by  shallow 
channels.  The  holes  vary  in  depth  from  2^  to  3^  inches. 
Beginning  in-shore  and  following  the  channels,  their  distances 
apart  from  centre  to  centre  are  respectively  9^,  8,  9,  10^4  and 
9%  inches;  and  of  the  second  from  the  sixth,  15  inches.  They 
appear  to  have  been  drilled,  and  are  not  circular,  but  more  like 
triangles  with  rounded  angles.  This  would  be  a  natural  shape 
for  them  if  they  had  been  made  with  a  steel  drill  having  one 
straight  cutting  edge.  Their  diameter  at  the  top  is  1  ^  to  1  ^ 
inches,  narrowing  slightly  below.  The  top  edges  are  not  smooth- 
cut  but  broken  and  roughly  beveled.  The  channels  are  pecked  in, 
and  like  the  crudely  pecked  lines  of  other  rocks  of  this  region, 
are  very  irregular  in  width  and  depth.  Their  typical  width  is 
Yd,  to  Yi,  inch,  narrowing  rarely  to  ^,  and  widening  rarely  to 
^  or  1  inch.  Their  depth  is  usually  •3/16  to  y%  inch,  with 
extremes  from  J/2  down  to  a  mere  trace. 

In  the  more  conglomerate  portion  of  the  surface,  near  the 
first  and  second  holes,  the  stone  is  roughly  and  irregularly 
much  pocked  and  scaled,  and  here  it  is  doubtful  whether  or  not 


,»        16 

7          10 

18  M  14 

H'tf 

15 

21               22 

F   &4ft  visJ2 

2' 

28 

36  1 
42               ^'• 

38*»29 

38 
32 

81 

sft 

76                  2 

At; 

^0 


48 


53 


66 


is 


35 
51  25 


24 
hi     7 


54 


79 

n 


6?  .^- 

50 


,33 


40 


24 


24 


26 


Fie    5S      Chait  of    Arnolds    I'omt    md   \  icinit\     1 'oi  tsnioutli     K     I 


E^V^'-T 


"%«i»f' 


\ 


%  ^:ff.<fe?t>^-;i^^-^ 


Fig.   56.     The  Arnold's  Point  Cup   Stone 


Facing  page  216 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND  217 

there  was  another  shallow  curved  channel  leading  off  from  the 
one  between  these  two  holes  to  a  seventh  very  shallow  depres- 
sion, and  whether  or  not  there  was  a  shallow  irregular  half- 
ring  about  hole  number  2.  The  marks  so  described  might  be 
either  natural  or  artificial,  but  are  probably  natural. 

The  history  of  this  stone  is  unknown  earlier  than  1910, 
when  it  was  shown  by  a  native  of  Portsmouth  to  Mr.  David 
Hutcheson  of  Washington,  D.  C.  He  writes  me  concerning  it : 
"At  first  sight  I  thought,  from  the  arrangement  of  the  holes, 
that  it  was  an  attempt  to  represent  The  Dipper,  but  the  seventh 
star  was  missing.  On  a  sheet  of  paper  I  drew  a  rough  out- 
line of  the  face  of  the  stone  showing  the  position  of  the  holes. 
I  sent  this  to  Mr.  Babcock  and  he  showed  it  to  some  of  the 
Washington  anthropologists,  and  they  thought  it  was  an  Indian 
Cup  Stone."  In  1913  it  was  mentioned  by  William  H.  Bab- 
cock in  his  Early  Norse  Visits  to  America.  We  have  quoted 
his  belief  that  the  inscription  near  Mount  Hope  was  "almost 
certainly  Wampanoag  work;"  and  he  remarks  that  "the  same 
may  be  said  with  less  confidence"  of  this  Portsmouth  stone. 

I  have  seen  numerous  examples  of  isolated  drill-holes  in 
rocks  along  shore,  which  may  have  been  made  to  hold  ringbolts 
or  stakes  for  boat  moorings,  for  attaching  the  nets  of  fish- 
weirs,  or  for  other  commonplace  purposes.  But  no  such  use 
can  be  attributed  to  this  constellation  of  six  holes  connected  by 
shallow  channels. 

Since  one  of  the  possibilities  concerning  this  boulder  is  that 
it  is  a  genuine  cup-stone  of  considerable  antiquity,  it  will  not  be 
amiss  to  look  briefly  into  the  distribution,  character  and  signifi- 
cance of  stones  so  marked.  Cup-like  excavations,  usually  in 
irregular  groups,  are  among  the  most  primitive  of  markings 
on  stone,  are  found  widely  distributed  over  nearly  the  entire 
world,  are  nearly  everywhere  similar,  and  are  often  closely  asso- 
ciated with  cromlechs,  stone  circles  and  other  primitive  stone 
monuments.  Many  examples  of  them  have  been  reported  from 
both  North  and  South  America.  Usually  they  are  shallow  de- 
pressions, from  Yz  to  \  inch  deep  and  1  to  3  inches  in  diameter. 
Larger  ones  occur  rarely,  extending  up  to  basins  nearly  3  feet 
in  diameter  and  9  inches  in  depth.     A  few  of  the  common 


218  DIGHTON  ROCK 

narrow  type  are  of  unusual  depth,  thus  resembling  more  nearly 
those  at  Portsmouth.  Thus,  on  the  shore  in  Scotland  they  have 
been  found  2^  inches  in  depth,  always  more  than  one,  irregu- 
larly placed;  and  the  Handbook  of  American  Indians  speaks 
of  many  cups  prolonged  below  by  a  secondary  pit  as  though 
made  with  a  flint  drill  or  gouge.  The  cups  occasionally  occur 
singly,  more  often  in  constellation-like  groups,  most  often 
irregularly  distributed  over  the  surface,  in  number  often  up  to 
20,  in  rare  instances  up  to  50,  100  or  even  200  on  one  rock  or 
ledge.  Very  commonly,  but  not  always,  they  are  surrounded 
by  from  one  to  seven  concentric  rings,  which  sometimes  have  a 
straight  radial  groove  running  out  through  them.  Not  infre- 
quently the  cups,  whether  with  or  without  rings,  are  connected 
together  by  grooved  lines. 

A  vast  variety  of  theories  have  been  advanced  to  account 
for  the  meaning  of  these  simplest,  most  primitive  and  most 
wide-spread  of  sculptured  marks.  They  are  of  a  deep  psycho- 
logical interest  as  showing  the  inexhaustible  budding-out  proc- 
ess of  man's  speculations  about  things  that  are  mysterious. 
Among  them  are  these:  they  are  natural,  not  artificial;  there 
is  no  clue  to  their  purpose ;  they  are  plans  of  neighboring  camps, 
or  maps  of  neighboring  peaks;  sacred  symbols  of  tombs  ap- 
proached by  an  underground  passage  and  marked  above  by 
stone  circles ;  symbols  of  life;  enumeration  of  families  or  tribes ; 
representations  of  sun,  moon  and  constellations;  a  primitive 
form  of  writing;  tables  for  some  gambling  game;  moulds  for 
casting  rings;  representations  of  shields;  totems;  small  wine- 
presses or  grain  mortars;  holes  made  in  grinding  pestles; 
depressions  for  cracking  nuts,  or  grinding  paint,  or  for  steady- 
ing drills,  spindles  or  fire-sticks,  or  for  collection  of  water ;  sun- 
dials; relics  of  sun-worship  of  the  Phoenicians,  or  of  Roman 
Mithras-worship;  basins  for  holding  the  blood  of  sacrifice  or 
libations  to  spirits  or  to  the  dead;  objects  for  the  practice  of 
magic  and  necromancy. 

The  most  widely  accepted  view  of  them,  so  far  at  least  as 
their  occurrence  in  Europe  is  concerned,  is  that  they  are  symbols 
connected  with  the  religious  rites  or  beliefs  of  the  Druids,  the 
philosophers  and  priests  of  the  Celtic  tribes.    This  belief,  how- 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND  219 

ever,  has  no  confirmation,  and  is  now  unanimously  opposed  by 
well  informed  students.  Another  hypothesis,  which  seems  to 
be  unquestionably  true  of  them  in  some  parts  of  the  world,  is 
that  they  are  phallic  symbols.  Andrew  Lang^  believes  that  in 
Australia  they  were  all  originally  simply  decorative,  but  when 
found  on  sacred  ground  a  mythical  and  religious  meaning  is 
read  into  them.  Garrick  Mallery,^  who  says  that  a  large  num- 
ber of  stones  with  typical  cup  markings  have  been  found  in  the 
United  States,  explains  them  as  easily  drawn  and  probably 
meaningless  designs,  perhaps  "instinctive"  commencements  of 
the  artistic  practice,  as  was  the  earliest  delineation  of  the  cross 
figure.  "Afterward  the  rings  [and  cups],  if  employed  as 
symbols  or  emblems,  would  naturally  have  a  different  meaning 
applied  to  them  in  each  region  where  they  now  appear." 

There  seem  to  be  three  plausible  alternatives  concerning  this 
Portsmouth  Cup  Stone.  The  first  of  these  is  that  it  is  an  ex- 
ample of  Indian  cup-stone,  which  Mallery  and  the  Handbook 
describe  as  so  numerous,  and  which  the  latter  authority  says 
sometimes  have  drilled  pits  at  the  bottom  of  the  cups.  If  so,  it 
may  be  of  almost  any  period  down  to  and  into  Colonial  times. 
As  to  its  meaning,  it  may  or  may  not  have  had  one.  Mallery 
makes  it  very  clear  that  such  cuttings  may  often  have  been  the 
result  of  a  mere  aimless  desire  for  activity,  or  a  crude  attempt  to 
fabricate  something  ornamental.  On  the  other  hand,  it  may 
have  symbolized  something  to  the  individual  who  made  it,  and 
which,  of  course,  no  one  uninstructed  by  him  could  possibly 
decipher.  Such  private  symbolism  must  have  been  the  first  step 
beyond  the  activity-impulse  and  the  ornament-urge  already 
alluded  to;  and  the  further  step,  to  a  commonly  accepted  sym- 
bolism for  such  figures,  had  apparently  not  been  taken  by  the 
American  Indians. 

There  are  two  arguments  against  its  being  an  Indian  prod- 
uct :  the  fact  that  no  one  ever  reported  its  existence  before  1910, 
and  the  fact  that  its  holes  are  deeply  drilled  and  are  not  typical 
cups.  It  may  therefore  seem  more  probable  that  the  holes  were 
drilled  by  miners  in  idle  moments,  or  by  their  children  at  play. 

'^  Magic  and  Religion,  1901,  p.  241. 

3  Bureau  of  Amer.  Ethnol.,  10th  Ann.  Rep.,  pp.  189-200. 


220  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Coal  mines  were  opened  at  Portsmouth  apparently  as  early  as 
1808,  and  have  been  worked  frequently  at  intervals  since  then. 
The  longest  continuous  period  of  operation  was  by  the  Taunton 
Copper  Company,  from  about  1860  until  1883.  They  built  a 
dock,  railroad  connections,  and  a  copper  smelter,  and  mined 
about  ten  thousand  tons  a  year.  There  was  plenty  of  oppor- 
tunity, therefore,  for  the  idle  drilling  of  these  holes  at  a  rela- 
tively recent  date  by  white  workmen. 

But  while  the  holes  may  incline  one  strongly  to  the  belief 
that  they  were  hollowed  out  by  these  miners'  drills,  yet  the 
connecting  grooves,  crudely  pecked  between  them  and  unques- 
tionably of  considerable  age,  exactly  resemble  the  known  ex- 
amples of  Indian  rock-carving  in  this  region.  Though  pos- 
sible, it  does  not  seem  likely  that  white  men  equipped  with  drills 
and  hammers  would  have  made  them  as  additions  to  the  holes. 
With  the  holes  arguing  against  the  Indians  and  the  grooves 
against  more  recent  white  men,  we  have  nevertheless  a  third 
or  combination  alternative  as  a  possible  solution.  The  rock 
may  have  been  originally  a  typical  Indian  cup-stone,  devoid  of 
any  important  symbolism;  and  the  miners  or  miners'  children, 
seated  there  at  play  or  on  an  idle  day,  with  drills  accidentally  at 
hand,  may  have  deepened  the  original  cups.  This  hypothesis 
is  certainly  not  at  all  unlikely.  But  it  is  not  probable  that  we 
can  ever  be  sure  which  of  the  three  hypotheses  is  the  true  one. 

4.  Newport. — There  have  been  numerous  rumors  of  the 
existence  of  inscribed  rocks  in  the  vicinity  of  Newport.  There 
are  in  the  vicinity  several  examples  of  markings  that  are 
natural,  accidental,  or  the  incidental  result  of  operations  that 
had  another  purpose,  and  these  may  have  led  to  misinterpreta- 
tion as  intended  inscriptions.  Another  source  of  mistaken 
reports  was  undoubtedly  the  manner  in  which  Kendall,  in  a 
list  of  sculptured  rocks  of  which  he  had  heard,  referred  to  the 
ones  at  Portsmouth:  'Tn  Narragansett  Bay,  on  Rhode  Island 
near  Newport,  on  the  lands  of  Mr.  Job  Almy."  Dr.  Stiles, 
who  resided  in  Newport  for  twenty-one  years  and  sought 
eagerly  for  inscriptions  on  rocks,  never  found  any  nearer  than 
Portsmouth,  except  two  that  were  dated  1728  and  were  made 
by  a  white  man.    One  of  these  was  at  Brenton's  Point  and  is 


Fig.   57.      Chart  of  portions  of   Portsmouth  and   Tiverton   in  the 
vicinity  of   Fogland   Point 


^'^C:'^ 


Fig.  58.     Chart  of   the   southerly  part  of   Middletown,   R.   I. 
Fa':iug  page  220 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND  221 

still  extant,  bearing  the  words:  "Beleve  in  Christ  &  Live  in 
No  Sin."  The  other,  at  Price's  Cove,  has  now  disappeared. 
It  read :  "God  Presarve  All  Mankind."  Stiles  attributed  them 
both  to  the  Rev.  Nathaniel  Clap,  On  another  stone,  near  the 
second,  he  saw  "a  number  of  seeming  Incisions  of  the  Wedge 
or  Runic  Kind,  but  evidently  the  Work  of  Nature  only."  I 
have  myself  observed  in  that  vicinity  wedge-like  marks  of 
natural  origin,  which  the  incautious  might  easily  mistake  for 
artificial  incisions. 

On  March  3,  1840,  Dr.  Christopher  Perry  of  Newport 
reported  to  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society  that  he  had  dis- 
covered some  rocks  near  Newport  bearing  inscriptions  resem- 
bling those  on  the  rocks  at  Dighton  and  Portsmouth.  The 
records  of  the  Society  state:  "Since  then  the  rock  has  been 
visited  and  examined  by  John  R.  Bartlett.  The  impressions 
were  found  to  be  very  indistinct,  but  Mr.  B.  succeeded  in  mak- 
ing a  drawing,  which  will  be  presented  to  the  Society."  Un- 
fortunately no  such  drawing  has  been  preserved,  and  we  have 
no  knowledge  even  of  the  approximate  location  of  the  rock  or 
of  the  appearance  of  its  characters.  It  is  not  improbable  that 
it  was  similar  to,  if  not  identical  with,  those  seen  at  Price's 
Cove  by  Stiles  and  myself,  bearing  seeming  incisions  that  were 
"evidently  the  Work  of  Nature  only." 

5.  Middletown. — Within  a  short  distance  of  Newport 
there  is  one  interesting  set  of  markings  that  are  unquestionably 
artificial,  although  they  do  not  in  any  sense  constitute  an  in- 
scription. They  are  a  collection  of  basins  and  grooves  on  the 
rocks  of  the  Bluflfs  near  Purgatory.  It  is  rather  remarkable 
that  the  only  allusions  to  them  in  print  that  I  have  been  able  to 
discover  are  such  as  speak  of  them  in  connection  with  foolish 
legends  only,  calling  them  the  Devil's  footprints,  or  the  marks 
of  his  dragging  a  sinful  woman  over  the  rocks,  or  of  the  axe 
that  he  used  in  beheading  her.  They  appear  never  to  have  been 
really  described,  though  they  are  familiar  to  the  passing  visitor. 

The  chart  and  photographs  of  Figures  58  and  59  show  the 
location  of  the  Purgatory  rocks  and  the  appearance  of  the 
markings.  These  occur  on  narrow  sandstone  intrusions  in  the 
conglomerates   at   the  lowest  part   of   the   ledges   near   their 


222  DIGHTON  ROCK 

northern  extremity  at  Sachuest  Beach,  just  before  the  rocks 
begin  to  rise  into  cliffs.  They  begin  about  250  feet  beyond  the 
extreme  meeting-point  of  rocks  and  beach,  and  occur  at  inter- 
vals for  a  distance  of  about  100  feet  toward  the  south.  They 
are  of  two  kinds.  Some  of  them  are  shallow  oval  or  roundish 
depressions  or  basins,  somewhat  like  pot-holes  but  clearly  not 
due  to  natural  forces.  They  might  even  be  classed  as  large  cup- 
markings.  There  are  about  three  dozen  of  them  in  all,  ranging 
in  size  from  long  ovals  measuring  about  25  by  10  inches,  down 
to  more  nearly  circular  cups  about  7  to  10  inches  in  one  diameter 
and  6  to  9  in  the  other.  Their  depth  runs  from  a  little  less 
than  an  inch  to  about  2  inches.  Some  are  rather  rough  and 
irregular,  others  very  regular,  clear-cut  and  smooth.  The 
grooves  of  the  second  type  look  very  much  like  such  a  cut  as 
would  be  made  in  soft  material  by  a  clean  blow  with  a  sharp 
axe.  The  largest  is  14  inches  long,  1^4  wide  and  If^  deep  at 
the  centre,  narrowing  and  curving  upward  to  a  point  at  either 
extremity.  Another  measures  9  by  1}^,  and  }i  deep.  Most 
of  them  are  7  to  10  inches  long,  %.  to  y2  wide,  and  ^  to  ^ 
deep.  I  counted  twelve  of  them  in  all.  One  of  them,  shown 
in  the  photograph,  is  at  the  bottom  of  one  of  the  basins.  Be- 
sides these  narrow  grooves  and  wider  basins,  there  are  two 
other  incisions  of  interest,  as  well  as  numerous  names  and 
initials.  One  is  a  representation  of  an  arrow,  about  3^  inches 
long,  shallow  but  very  clear.  The  other  is  a  figure  like  the 
"eye"  of  a  dressmaker's  hook-and-eye,  about  5  inches  long  and 
wide,  with  a  sort  of  U  between  the  small  circles  of  the  open 
end.  The  U  and  the  circles  are  made  of  very  small  clear  dots, 
the  rest  is  grooved.  Whether  these  two  figures  are  due  to  the 
makers  of  the  other  grooves  and  basins,  or  to  more  recent 
visitors,  it  is  impossible  to  determine. 

While  studying  these  basins,  I  heard  some  passers-by  speak 
of  them  as  "Devil's  Footprints,"  probably  because  of  the  fre- 
quently repeated  legends  already  referred  to.  Apparently  this 
name  gets  attached  everywhere  to  any  mysterious  holes  in 
rocks  that  in  the  least  resemble  the  prints  of  feet  or  hoofs. 
There  are  other  alleged  instances  of  marks  made  by  the  Devil 
in  Warwick,  in  Swansea,  near  New  Bedford,  and  probably  in 


^4^y^^-- 


•^'^ 


.  h9^  J:^<  .^.yodb^l^'«>^»^S^f^ 


Fig.  59.     The  basiii.s  aiul  grooves  on  ledges  near  Purgatory 
Facing  page  222 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND  223 

other  places.  The  only  serious  account  of  the  origin  of  these 
near  Newport  that  I  have  heard  of  was  related  to  me  by  Dr. 
Eugene  P.  King  of  Providence.  He  was  told  about  30  years 
ago  that  the  basins  were  made  in  old  days  by  Indians  in  polish- 
ing some  object  by  rubbing  it  round  and  round.  As  to  the 
"axe-cut"  grooves,  the  Indians  made  them  also,  he  was  in- 
formed, in  sharpening  their  arrow-points.  Doubtless  it  was 
not  actually  stone  arrow-points  that  were  thus  sharpened  there, 
for  these  the  Indians  fashioned  and  sharpened  by  flaking,  not 
by  grinding.  But  others  of  their  implements,  including  bone 
and  horn  arrows  and  darts,  were  polished  and  sharpened  by 
grinding,  and  for  this  purpose,  says  W.  H.  Holmes,*  "in  many 
localities  exposed  surfaces  of  rock  in  place  were  utilized,  and 
these  are  often  covered  with  the  grooves  produced  by  the  grind- 
ing work.  These  markings  range  from  narrow,  shallow  lines 
produced  by  shaping  pointed  objects,  to  broad  channels  made 
in  shaping  large  implements  and  utensils."  This  description 
exactly  applies  to  the  markings  on  these  Purgatory  rocks,  and 
might  have  been  written  with  especial  reference  to  them.  It 
supplies  the  natural  and  almost  certain  explanation  of  their 
origin. 

In  our  discussion  of  Dighton  Rock,  we  saw  that  du  Simi- 
tiere  reported  that  Dean  Berkeley  had  been  informed  that  its 
incisions  were  made  by  Indians  in  sharpening  their  arrow- 
points.  It  seems  much  more  likely  that  the  legend  as  related 
is  a  case  of  transference  from  one  region,  of  which  it  may  be 
true,  to  another  where  it  cannot  possibly  apply.  Berkeley 
wrote  much  of  his  Alciphron  while  sitting  under  the  shelter  of 
the  overhanging  ledges  at  Paradise  Rocks.  He  was  a  lover  of 
nature,  and  must  have  strolled  upon  the  beaches  and  climbed 
over  the  rocks  near  Purgatory,  close  by.  In  fact,  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  second  dialogue  of  the  treatise  mentioned,  he  speaks 
of  going  down  to  a  beach,  "where  we  walked  on  the  smooth 
sand,  with  the  ocean  on  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  wild  broken 
rocks,"  and  this  was  doubtless  not  his  only  visit  there.  It  was 
there,  much  more  probably  than  at  Assonet  Neck,  that  "a 

*  Handbook  of  American  Indians,  Bureau  of  Amer.  Ethnology,  Bulletin 
30,  part  i,  page  7. 


224  DIGHTON  ROCK 

farmer  of  the  neighborhood"  expounded  to  him,  and  perhaps 
with  truth,  the  same  explanation  of  the  marks  that  was  still 
current  when  Dr.  King  heard  the  story.  Afterwards,  when 
the  Dean  had  described  his  visits  and  observations  at  both 
places,  his  auditors,  unacquainted  with  either,  easily  mixed 
them  up  and  attached  the  arrow-sharpening  incident  to  the 
wrong  rock. 

It  is  barely  possible  that  King's  Rocks  near  Warren  con- 
stitute another  case  where  marks  were  made  by  Indians  without 
direct  intention,  incidentally  to  their  other  operations.  The 
belief  has  been  expressed  that  a  long  trough  worn  into  the  sur- 
face of  the  ledge  was  made  by  Indians  rolling  a  heavy  corn- 
grinding  stone  in  it.  But  I  am  told  that,  in  the  opinion  of 
geologists,  the  rock  exhibits  nothing  more  than  the  results 
of  glaciation.  The  place  has  long  attracted  the  attention  of 
initial-carving  visitors.  I  have  found  one  date  recorded  as 
early  as  1834. 

Middletown  supplies  one  further  contribution  to  our  study. 
Dr.  Webb  wrote  to  Rafn  in  1835  that  John  Almy  of  Tiverton 
thought  he  had  heard  of  an  inscription-rock  at  Sachuest  Point. 
We  have  seen  reason,  in  connection  with  Mount  Hope,  to  be- 
lieve that  Almy's  memory  of  old  conversations  was  faulty ;  and 
it  was  probably  so  in  this  case.  The  marks  at  Purgatory,  at  the 
other  end  of  Sachuest  Beach,  were  commonly  confused  at  New- 
port with  those  of  Dighton  Rock,  as  du  Simitiere's  story  about 
Berkeley  testifies;  and  it  was  probably  another  confusion  of 
this  sort  that  was  responsible  for  Almy's  impression.  How- 
ever, I  made  a  search  at  Sachuest  Point  in  1919,  and  found  a 
rock  that  appeared  at  first  sight  to  be  covered  with  rude  artifi- 
cial characters.  With  its  partial  covering  of  lichens,  some 
marks  looked  like  an  Indian's  crude  drawing  of  a  human  figure, 
and  others  like  circles  and  curves  and  a  figure  4  that,  if  cor- 
rectly seen,  must  have  been  deliberately  produced  by  human 
beings.  But  after  more  deliberate  study,  and  the  discovery  of 
other  rocks  similarly  marked,  I  became  convinced  that  the  in- 
cisions are  all  either  plough-marks,  or  to  a  less  extent  due  to 
the  action  of  harrow  and  crowbar.  The  neighboring  cultivated 
field  contains  many  stones,  slabs  and  small  boulders,  buried  at 


THE  ISLAND  OF  RHODE  ISLAND  225 

various  depths.  The  "inscribed"  stones  on  the  bank  nearby 
have  been  drawn  out  from  this  field  from  time  to  time.  A  stone 
lying  with  a  flat  face  upward  at  just  the  right  depth  to  engage 
the  nose  of  a  plough  without  much  interruption  to  its  progress 
would  bei  scored  by  just  such  lines  year  after  year,  until  it 
became  enough  of  a  nuisance  to  get  dug  out  and  carted  to  the 
dump  heap. 

In  Newport  and  Middletown,  therefore,  aside  from  the 
pious  work  of  Mr.  Clap  in  1728,  there  are  no  rock-inscriptions. 
Nevertheless,  there  have  been  rumors,  and  it  is  important  to 
have  discovered  the  truth  about  them.  These  cases  emphasize 
the  fact  that,  in  the  endeavor  to  make  an  exhaustive  and  trust- 
worthy study  of  genuine  inscriptions,  it  is  necessary  frequently 
to  investigate  uncertain  reports,  and  to  make  a  distinction  that 
is  not  always  easy  to  establish  conclusively  between  the  genuine 
cases  and  a  number  of  alternative  possibilities.  Among  the 
latter  we  must  include  natural  forces  of  a  wide  variety,  distorted 
rumor,  deliberate  fraud,  and  likewise  human  yet  unintended 
agency  such  as  that  of  plough,  crowbar  and  other  tools,  or  that 
resulting  in  grooves  incidental  to  grinding  and  similar  processes. 
Any  of  these  may  give  rise  to  belief  that  inscriptions  exist 
where  none  are  actually  to  be  found. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

THE  WRITTEN  ROCKS  AT  TIVERTON 

The  town  of  Tiverton,  lying  across  the  Sakonnet  River 
from  Portsmouth,  was  once,  like  the  latter,  a  centre  for  the 
activities  of  the  ancient  rock-inscribers.  There  is  evidence 
that  there  was  formerly  a  considerable  number  of  rocks  in 
Tiverton  whose  surfaces  served  as  tablets  for  the  primitive  en- 
graver. Some  of  them  have  been  destroyed,  some  used  in  con- 
structing stone  walls  or  foundations,  some  covered  deep  with 
the  debris  of  storms,  so  that  now  there  is  only  one  exposed 
to  view.  The  main  road  from  Fall  River  to  Sakonnet  passes 
near  the  place,  which  is  about  five  miles  south  of  the  Stone 
Bridge,  and  a  short  distance  southwest  of  Tiverton  Four  Cor- 
ners. Leaving  the  main  road  near  the  latter  place,  a  by-road 
leading  westerly  is  taken,  either  the  one  just  north  or  equally 
well  the  one  just  south  of  Nonquit  Pond.  This  is  followed, 
with  the  necessary  turns  as  indicated  on  the  chart  (Figure  57) 
until  we  pass  the  wharf  south  of  Fogland  Point  and  proceed 
nearly  to  High  Hill,  walking  down  to  the  beach  just  before  the 
latter  is  reached.  A  short  distance  from  High  Hill,  on  the 
next  little  point  north  of  it,  about  opposite  the  number  16  that 
appears  as  a  depth-indication  on  the  chart,  is  a  group  of 
large  "graywacke"  or  sandstone  boulders  on  the  shore  between 
the  low  and  the  high  water  levels.  The  only  one  of 
these  that  is  inscribed  is  marked  with  an  X  in  the  photo- 
graph showing  the  appearance  of  the  group  (Figure  60),  and 
is  thus  readily  identified.  It  is  the  most  southerly  and  farthest 
in-shore  of  the  larger  boulders.  North  of  this  group,  about 
half-way  to  the  wharf,  is  a  ledge  of  similar  rock,  with  a  fish- 
weir  at  its  southerly  end. 

A  very  striking  feature  of  the  situation  consists  in  the  enor- 

226 


Fig.  60.     The  group  of  Tiverton  boulders  as  seen  from  the  south 


:'\ 


Vt^:-- 


"/l 


Fig.  61.    The  Tiverton  inscription 


huiiiig   page   226 


WRITTEN  ROCKS  AT  TIVERTON  227 

mous  masses  of  water-worn  stones  that  cover  the  beach  and 
rise  up  in  thick  deposits  behind  the  group  of  boulders.  The 
photograph  shows  their  appearance  better  than  words  can 
describe  it.  Some  of  the  inscribed  boulders  that,  as  late  at 
least  as  1835,  were  plainly  exposed  to  view,  now  lie  completely 
buried  by  these  storm-tossed  fragments.  The  spot  impressed 
Dr.  Webb,  when  he  viewed  it,  as  apparently  "one  of  Nature's 
favorite  battle  grounds;  and  the  great  masses  of  rock  scattered 
around  and  piled  upon  one  another,  near  by,  indicate  the  rav- 
ages which  at  some  distant  period  here  took  place.  The  inroads 
made  upon  most  of  these  boulders,  by  the  action  of  winds,  and 
tides  and  storms,  are  strongly  evidenced  by  the  singularly  cellu- 
lated  or  honeycombed  appearance  they  present."  He  expressed 
the  opinion  that  the  great  September  gale  of  1815  was  respon- 
sible for  serious  damage  to  the  inscriptions,  since  "the  water 
swept  with  such  tremendous  violence  and  power  over  the 
ground  where  the  Inscription-Monuments  are  situated,  that  it 
bore  along  with  it  rocks,  and  sand  and  gravel,  which  so  ground 
in  upon  the  faces  of  them  as  to  occasion  their  present  impaired 
condition."  But  though  thus  injured,  none  of  the  rocks  were 
then  covered  by  the  piles  of  loose  stones.  This  had  happened, 
however,  in  1868,  when  Dr.  Samuel  A.  Green  reported  that  he 
could  find  only  one  of  them.^  The  present  owner  of  the  place, 
Mr.  Leon  F.  Almy,  tells  me  that  about  ten  years  ago  the  beach 
back  of  the  rock  was  washed  up  two  or  three  feet  higher  than 
before.  Both  he  and  the  writer  have,  at  different  times,  thrown 
aside  considerable  quantities  of  the  overlying  stones  in  the 
endeavor,  as  yet  unsuccessful,  to  uncover  additional  inscrip- 
tions ;  but  a  year  later  the  stones  had  been  washed  back  again. 
Evidently  the  spot  is  still  "one  of  Nature's  favorite  battle 
grounds;"  and  we  may  well  hope  that  in  her  changing  moods 
she  may  some  day  wash  away  these  obstructing  stones  and 
again  reveal  the  missing  inscriptions. 

The  single  inscription  now  observable  is  on  a  nearly  plane 
surface  of  rock  measuring  about  four  by  seven  feet,  inclined  a 
little  to  the  north  of  west  at  an  angle  of  23°  to  the  horizontal. 
The  lines  are  pecked  in,  with  a  depth  usually  of  2  to  5,  though 

1  Proc.  Amer.  Antiqu.  Soc,  Oct.  21,  1868,  p.  13. 


228  DIGHTON  ROCK 

occasionally  as  much  as  8  millimeters.  One  possibly  artificial 
cup  near  the  centre  is  15  millmeters  deep  and  60  in  diameter. 
On  account  of  the  conditions  of  lighting,  it  is  difficult  to  secure 
photographs  which  show  the  carvings  clearly.  Probably  the 
one  here  presented,  in  Figure  61,  is  as  successful  as  any  that 
could  be  made  without  artificial  lighting.  It  was  taken  on 
October  29,  1919,  just  at  sunset  of  a  day  without  clouds  or 
mist,  with  the  light  glancing  low  across  the  face  in  such  manner 
as  to  throw  the  figures  into  the  greatest  possible  relief,  and  with 
the  daylight  supplemented  slightly  by  a  not  very  successfully 
working  flashlight. 

Examination  of  the  rock  itself,  and  comparison  of  these  pho- 
tographs with  the  earlier  drawings  of  Figures  62  to  66,  show 
several  features  of  interest.  The  most  prominent  and  certain 
artificial  markings  are  a  figure  shaped  like  the  number  4,  an 
oval  or  diamond  with  central  dot,  an  ill-shaped  X,  some  zig- 
zags, and  finally  the  crude  figure  of  a  man,  about  two  feet  in 
length,  with  cross-lines  running  from  each  shoulder  to  opposite 
hip,  Mr.  Almy  thinks  that  the  man  is  represented  as  hanging 
from  a  gibbet,  and  there  is  some  faint  suggestion  of  this  in  the 
drawing  of  1768.  The  surface  of  the  rock  above  the  inscribed 
portion  and  to  a  slight  extent  below  it  is  deeply  and  intricately 
pitted  and  honeycombed,  and  is  evidently  soft  enough  to  have 
been  subjected  to  great  decay  and  wear.  But  the  inscribed  sur- 
face itself  is  of  more  resistant  material,  and  clearly  has  suffered 
little  in  the  course  of  150  years.  Stiles's  careful  drawing 
shows  not  only  the  artificial  lines  but  also  many  of  the  natural 
pittings  and  flakings  of  the  surface,  distinguished  by  dots 
between  the  lines.  These  features  remain  now,  in  size,  shape 
and  position,  almost  exactly  what  they  were  in  his  day.  The 
"graywacke"  of  this  boulder  is  very  similar  to  that  of  Dighton 
Rock  and  the  other  inscribed  rocks  of  this  region.  In  spite  of 
its  exposure  to  unusually  severe  batterings  by  storm,  stones 
and  ice,  the  Tiverton  rock  has  suffered  little,  and  this  strongly 
supports  the  belief  that  on  all  of  these  sandstone  rocks  through- 
out the  region  actual  erosion  has  been  so  slow  as  to  have  made 
no  appreciable  change  in  the  appearance  of  the  figures  carved  on 
them  since  the  time  of  their  earliest  observation. 


^N> 


I- 


\i 


.'i. 


,^  if  '.U4  lJ4  2UJ 


Fig.  62.      Stiles's   First   Drawing    (Its  lowest   line   reads: 
F  8  Inc.  to  +) 


_  J?^/ 


W, 


.0. 


COD    .^'S..^ 


Fig.  63.     Stiles's  Second  Drawing 

Drawings   of   Tiverton   inscriptions   liy   Ezra   Stiles,   June   7,    17o8, 

from  his  Itineraries,  ii.  351,  352 

Faciiu/  payc  228 


WRITTEN  ROCKS  AT  TIVERTON  229 

So  far  as  we  know,  Dr.  Stiles  was  the  first  person  who 
investigated  the  "Written  Rocks,"  as  he  called  them,  in  Tiver- 
ton. He  went  there  first  a  year  after  his  first  inspection  of  the 
Dighton  and  Portsmouth  rocks,  arriving  on  June  6,  1768,  and 
lodging  with  Mr.  John  Almy,  son  of  Col.  Job  Almy,  who  died 
in  1767.  Mr.  Almy  was  deaf,  and  consequently  Dr.  Stiles 
wrote  down  in  his  Itinerary  certain  questions  which  he  wished 
to  ask  him.  We  can  infer  from  the  context  the  answers  that 
he  received.  Including  these  within  brackets,  the  following  is 
the  record  of  their  conversation  : 

"  'Please  to  tell  me  how  I  may  find  the  Rock  markt  with 
Characters  in  your  Farm.'  [Location  of  two  or  more  such 
rocks  given  by  Mr.  Almy.]  'Do  you  know  any  other?'  ['Yes ; 
but  it  has  been  destroyed.']  'How  long  ago?'  ['Six  years.'] 
'1762?'  ['Yes.]  Cut  it  up  for  Whetstones  &  sent  to  Nova 
Scotia.'  " 

On  the  following  day,  Stiles  made  drawings  of  the  inscrip- 
tions on  two  rocks  in  his  Itinerary  (Figures  62,  63).  Under- 
neath each  drawing  are  several  indications  of  dimensions ;  and 
underneath  the  second  is  the  statement :  "A  Third  Stone 
obliterated  and  two  other  small  Stones."  Twenty  years  later, 
on  September  29  and  30,  1788,  Stiles  again  copied  the  charac- 
ters on  these  rocks,  but  the  drawings  made  on  this  occasion  are 
not  preserved. 

When  Edward  A.  Kendall  compiled  his  "List  of  Indian 
Sculptures"  in  1809,  he  erroneously  interpreted  Stiles's  man- 
uscripts as  indicating  two  localities  here  instead  of  one.  His 
item  11  reads:  "In  Narragansett  Bay,  on  the  lands  of  the  late 
Col.  Almy,  on  the  peninsula  of  Paucatuc,  on  the  east  side  of  the 
bay,  and  at  six  miles  from  the  shore;"  and  item  12:  "In  the 
same,  at  Tiverton."  Evidently  Paucatuc  should  have  been  writ- 
ten Punkatace,  the  distance  mentioned  was  not  from  the  shore 
but  from  Newport,  and  with  these  corrections  the  two  items 
should  have  been  combined  into  one. 

Webb  and  Bartlett  visited  these  rocks  on  the  18th  of  Au- 
gust, 1835,  made  drawings  of  their  inscriptions,  and  on  Octo- 
ber 3 1  made  the  following  report  to  Raf n : 


230 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


Figures  64— Webb-Bartlett  Drawing  "No.  4.  6  x  8V2   feet." 


IlLECl b 


^^, 


v^,~ 


I  LLCGiiei.1 


Figure  65— Webb-Bartlett  Drawing  "No.  5.  4  x  7  feet." 


WRITTEN  ROCKS  AT  TIVERTON  231 


Figure  66 — Webb-Bartlett  Drawing  "No.  6." 
Drawings  of  Tiverton  Inscriptions  by  John  R.  Bartlett,  August  18,  1835. 

The  inscriptions  are  on  masses  of  gray-wacke,  near  a  ledge 
of  the  same  rock,  occurring  on  the  shore  of  Mr.  Almy's  farm,  a 
short  distance  to  the  N.W.  of  the  High  Hill.  The  Drawings  sent 
marked  No.  4,  5  &  6  exhibit  the  present  condition  of  the  Inscrip- 
tions. No.  4  and  5  are  on  a  line  ranging  from  N.E.  to  S.W.  No. 
4  is  a  very  large  mass,  if  not  in  fact  a  continuous  portion  of  the 
ledge  near  by.  It  being  buried  in  the  ground,  we  were  unable  to 
decide  the  point.  The  markings  are  on  its  upper  surface,  which  is 
inclined  at  an  angle  of  a  few  degrees  to  the  N.  and  that  part 
which  is  uncovered,  measures  S}^  feet  in  length  and  6  feet  in 
breadth.  It  is  utterly  impossible  for  us  to  conjecture  what  was 
formerly  in  the  vacant  spaces;  we  can  only  state,  they  were  oc- 
cupied with  some  kind  of  characters.  The  individual,  upon  whose 
land  they  are,  thinks  there  was  never  any  thing  but  human  figures 
on  them ;  but  sufficient  even  now  remains  to  prove  the  incorrectness 
of  his  opinion;  look,  for  Instance,  at  the  figure  resembling  some- 
what a  cross,  and  at  the  one  a  little  below  it,  to  the  right.  This 
rock  has  a  crevice  running  across  it  near  the  upper  left  hand 
corner;  and  a  portion  has  been  broken  away  at  the  upper  right 
hand  corner.  The  characters  on  another  lying  between  No,  4  and 
No.  5  have  become  entirely  obliterated.  Those  on  No.  5  faced 
to  the  the  N.W.  and  the  space  they  occupied  measured  4  feet  by 


232  DIGHTON  ROCK 

7  feet.  The  human  figure  on  this  rock  is  more  distinct  and  perfect 
than  the  rest,  being  formed  on  a  much  larger  scale,  and  the  in- 
dentations being  deeper.  The  peculiarity  about  the  left  knee  will 
not  escape  your  notice.  No.  6  is  a  small  stone  of  a  schistose  struc- 
ture lying  a  short  distance  to  the  S.  of  the  others,  and  might  be 
lifted  by  two  stout  men;  it  is  of  the  size  of  the  outline  sent,  on 
which  the  characters  are  represented  of  their  true  dimensions. 
These  are  formed  in  a  different  manner  from  the  others  and  per- 
haps are  of  a  different  origin ;  although  we  do  not  pretend  to 
decide  upon  the  matter ;  they  are  channelled  or  grooved,  and  appear 
to  have  been  made  by  a  chizzel  or  smooth  cutting  instrument.  Pre- 
viously to  1815,  according  to  Mr,  Almy,  the  characters  were  so 
plain,  that  they  could  be  clearly  distinguished  at  some  distance 
from  the  rocks.  .  .  .  The  distance  across,  from  the  Tiverton  Rocks 
to  the  Rhode  Island  shore  is  1J4  rnile  and  to  Newport  6^4  miles. 

The  portions  of  the  letter  here  omitted  discuss  the  oblit- 
erating effect  of  storms  and  have  already  been  quoted. 

Instead  of  reproducing  the  Webb-Bartlett  drawings  as 
given  in  Tabella  XIII  of  Antiquitates  AmericancB,  our  Figures 
64  to  66  present  the  originals  of  them  in  possession  of  the 
Rhode  Island  Historical  Society.  Like  the  Portsmouth  draw- 
ings, these  are  on  sheets  of  paper  measuring  15^  by  19^ 
inches,  and  are  here  shown  much  reduced. 

The  only  further  report  upon  these  rocks  based  upon  per- 
sonal inspection  that  we  possess  is  that  of  Dr.  Samuel  A.  Green 
in  1868,  already  cited.  Although  he  knew  that  three  sculptured 
rocks  had  been  found  here  by  Webb,  he  could  then  discover 
but  one  of  them.  "Of  the  missing  two  at  Tiverton,  one  is 
known  to  have  been  taken  away  several  years  ago  and  kept  as  a 
curiosity  near  a  farm  house.  It  was  afterwards  built  into  a  wall 
in  such  a  way  that  the  pictured  face  could  not  be  seen.  .  .  . 
The  stone  at  Tiverton  is  a  mica-slate.  .  .  .  Many  of  the  marks 
are  still  distinct  and  well-defined,  and  perhaps  were  made  by 
the  same  tribe  that  made  those  on  Dighton  Rock.  They  are 
of  interest  as  early  specimens  of  rude  Indian  art." 

In  these  accounts,  there  is  evidence  that  at  least  six  rocks 
bearing  man-made  characters  were  once  included  in  this  Tiver- 


WRITTEN  ROCKS  AT  TIVERTON  233 

ton  group.  Giving  them  arbitrary  numbers,  and  assuming  as 
few  as  possible,  they  were  as  follows :  1.  The  one  reported  to 
Stiles  as  having  been  cut  up  into  whetstones  in  1762  and  sent 
to  Nova  Scotia.  2.  The  first  of  Dr.  Stiles ;  Webb's  No.  4;  now 
buried  deeply  underneath  the  stone-heaps  on  the  shore.  3. 
Webb's  stone  with  characters  obliterated,  between  his  No.  4  and 
No.  5 ;  probably  identical  with  the  "third  stone  obliterated"  of 
Dr.  Stiles;  now  buried  under  loose  stones.  4.  The  second  of 
Dr.  Stiles ;  Webb's  No,  5 ;  the  one  now  visible  on  the  shore. 
5.  Webb's  No.  6,  originally  a  short  distance  to  the  south  of 
his  No.  5,  where  no  such  boulder  can  now  be  found,  although 
there  are  no  overlying  stones  on  that  part  of  the  beach;  perhaps 
identical  with  one  of  Stiles's  "two  other  small  stones,"  and  with 
the  one  reported  by  Dr.  Green  as  having  been  removed  and 
built  into  a  stone  wall.  6.  The  second  of  Stiles's  "two  other 
small  stones" ;  not  now  discoverable ;  had  probably  disappeared 
before  1835. 

When  Dr.  Stiles  first  saw  Dighton  Rock,  he  believed  that 
its  writing  was  "Phoenician  and  3000  years  old."  His  latest 
view,  expressed  in  1790,  applicable  to  the  Portsmouth  and 
Tiverton  rocks  as  well  as  to  that  on  Assonet  Neck,  was  prac- 
tically unchanged.  "There  seems  to  be  a  mixture  of  Phoenician 
or  antient  Punic  letters"  and  other  symbols,  he  wrote;  there 
might  have  been  a  "ship's  crew  from  the  Mediterranean  or 
Europe,  shipwreckt  in  Narraganset  Bay;"  and  the  rocks  may 
have  been  "of  the  period  of  the  Phoenician  ages  &  of  the  me- 
morable Atlantic  war  1300  years  before  the  Christian  AEra." 

When  Rafn  received  from  Webb  the  drawings  of  these 
rocks,  he  naturally  regarded  them  as  corroborating  his  opinion 
that  the  Norse  explorers  had  found  their  Vinland  here  and 
had  left  upon  its  rocks  evidences  of  their  brief  attempt  at  colo- 
nization. "There  are,"  he  says,  "indubitable  signs  of  Scan- 
dinavian origin  in  the  presence  of  unquestionable  runes  or  runic 
letters." 

In  confirmation  of  his  own  belief,  Rafn  sought  the  opinion 
of  the  learned  runologist,  Finn  Magnusen.     Between  them, 


234 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


they  found  upon  these  Portsmouth  and  Tiverton  rocks  the  fol- 
lowing runic  letters  and  monograms  :^ 


1 

K .  B  or  P  ,  Tb 

2 

3 

4 
-d[«  ^f"  •  AM 

5 

6 
X  •  0 

7 

8 
1  •  X  OP  G  peTCPsed 

9 
^  =  'f  Kl  •  AKI 

10 
1  t  K,  G»  OP  f  ♦  P 

11 
n  OP  n  •  U  or  V 

12 

13 
^  •O 

Figure  67 — Alleged  Runic  Characters  on  Portsmouth  and  Tiverton  Rocks. 

Magnusen's  report  is  of  the  kind  to  be  expected  of  a  runolo- 
gist  who  is  reported  to  have  once  found  a  complete  runic 
message  on  a  rock  which  more  reliable  authorities  assure  us  has 
on  it  nothing  but  natural  cracks  and  markings.  He  claims  that 
these  inscriptions  contain  lines  of  letters  which  "conform  per- 
fectly to  the  ordinary  Scandinavian  runes,  and  therefore  such 
an  origin  for  them  can  hardly  be  denied."  He  calls  particular 
attention  to  four  characters,  and  in  explanation  of  them  offers 
what  he  regards  as  "the  least  improbable  conjectures."  Con- 
cerning the  letters  which  we  have  numbered  2  and  3,  he  assumes 
that  "Leif  and  Tyrker,  two  of  the  earliest  dwellers  in  Vinland, 
wished  to  indicate  thus  their  names  by  their  initial  letters." 
Number  4  is  a  monogram  spelling  a  name  once  common  in  Ice- 
land.   There  was  an  An,  son  of  Thorer,  living  in  Iceland  at  the 

2  Numbers  1  to  6  are  on  the  Portsmouth  rocks.  Ebcamination  of  the 
Webb-Bartlett  drawings  will  discover  them.  Number  1  was  probably  found 
on  rock  number  3,  in  the  upper  line  at  the  left ;  2,  3  and  4  are  on  rock  num- 
ber 2,  in  the  middle  line ;  5  is  the  uppermost  character  on  rock  number  1,  and 
6  probably  the  one  at  the  extreme  right. 


J 


WRITTEN  ROCKS  AT  TIVERTON  235 

time  of  the  discovery  of  Vinland,  and  it  is  not  improbable  that 
he  may  have  been  a  companion  of  Thorfinn,  and  that  this 
monogram  may  have  been  executed  by  him.  Number  9  (on  a 
Tiverton  rock)  is  a  monogram  for  Aki,  which  was  formerly 
a  common  Scandinavian  name. 

Rafn's  main  work,  that  of  assembling  and  translating  the 
Vinland  sagas,  was  scholarly  and  admirable.  His  attempts  to 
locate  the  position  of  Vinland  were  uncritical,  founded  upon 
evidence  which  is  now  discredited.  Magnusen  surpasses  him 
in  mistaking  empty  guesswork  for  scientific  probability,  merely 
because  it  pleases  his  fancy.  It  is  evident  that  such  markings 
as  these  cannot  be  copied  with  any  sureness.  Yet  these  men 
assumed  that  the  drawings  sent  to  them  were  sufficiently  exact 
and  reliable  to  justify  their  conjectures.  Detached  simple  lines 
resembling  pot-hooks  and  crosses  and  arrows,  that  might  have 
been  pure  accidents,  or  have  been  parts  of  larger  partly  un- 
drawn figures,  or  have  meant  any  one  of  a  thousand  particular 
things,  they  regarded  as  "unquestionable"  runic  letters.  With 
thousands  of  possible  inscribers  to  be  considered — Phoenicians, 
Norsemen,  or  other  equally  unprovable  pre-Columbian  voyagers 
to  this  place,  Indians  of  countless  generations,  white  men  of 
many  nationalities  and  in  great  numbers,  who  may  have  passed 
this  way  before  Stiles  first  saw  the  rocks — Magnusen  felt  jus- 
tified in  believing  that  Leif  made  a  pot-hook  there  to  indicate 
his  name,  and  Tyrker  an  arrow-point !  It  is  an  extreme  ex- 
ample of  solemn  silliness  posing  as  serious  science. 

Rafn's  ideas  naturally  made  a  profound  impression.  They 
were  echoed  far  and  wide  by  numerous  writers,  and  these  rocks 
were  long  believed  by  many  of  them  to  have  been  engraved  by 
Northmen.  There  have  been  upholders  of  other  queer  views 
about  these  simple  carvings  besides  the  Norse  and  the  Phoeni- 
cian. The  Druidical  Monument  theory  expounded  in  1824  by 
John  Finch  and  in  1888  by  James  N.  Arnold  is  one  of  them. 
Another  is  the  equally  absurd  belief  of  John  Whipple  that 
there  are  no  artificial  characters  at  all  on  these  rocks.  Dr. 
Thomas  H.  Webb  is  authority  for  this  fact,  in  a  letter  which 
he  wrote  to  John  R.  Bartlett  in  1838,  which  Avas  quoted  in 
an  earlier  chapter. 


236  DIGHTON  ROCK 

In  recent  years  there  is  practically  no  dissent  from  the  view 
that  these  records  are,  as  Green  expressed  it,  specimens  of  rude 
Indian  art.  They  seem  to  be  executed  in  the  characteristic 
style  of  the  Indians,  now  familiar  to  us  through  numerous  far- 
scattered  examples.  Stiles's  note  that  the  Portsmouth  locality 
was  once  "a  place  of  Indian  Wigwaums"  gives  a  clear  clue  as 
to  who  were  the  probable  artists.  We  know  nothing  as  to  the 
time  when  the  work  was  done,  except  that  it  must  have  been 
long  enough  before  1767  to  render  the  marks  then  indistinct 
and  difficult  to  decipher.  Some  twenty  to  fifty  years  would 
have  sufficed  for  that,  as  our  studies  of  the  rocks  at  Assonet 
Neck  and  at  Mount  Hope  have  shown.  Consequently,  those  at 
Tiverton  might  even  have  been  engraved  as  late  as  July, 
1675,  at  which  time  Captain  Church  came  into  conflict  with  a 
party  of  Indians  on  the  beach  a  little  to  the  north  of  High 
Hill.^  The  carved  lines  may,  therefore,  be  of  relatively  late 
Colonial  date.  So  far  as  they  themselves  give  indication,  they 
might  also  equally  well  be  considerably  older  than  that.  We 
must  look  to  our  later  conclusions  for  a  solution. 

The  Tiverton  rocks,  of  course,  as  in  every  other  individual 
case,  have  a  content  different  from  that  of  any  others.  They 
include  a  large  number  of  rudely  executed  human  figures, 
which,  though  not  lacking,  are  much  less  numerous  on  other 
rocks  of  our  region.  But  these  appear  to  have  no  significant 
grouping,  to  tell  no  story,  and  are  probably  the  record  of  indi- 
vidual fancy.  The  single  human  figure  on  the  only  rock  now 
visible  has  a  certain  resemblance  to  others  discussed  in  the 
next  chapter.  The  other  markings  do  not  seem  to  be  repre- 
sentations of  anything  definite,  and,  as  in  the  case  of  those  at 
Portsmouth,  must  probably  be  classed  as  merely  whimsical  or 
decorative  scribblings. 

3  George  W.  Ellis,  King  Philip's  War,  1906,  p.  76. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

MARK  ROCK  IN   WARWICK 

The  most  astonishing  fact  in  all  the  history  of  the  pictured 
rocks  that  we  are  studying  is  that  one  of  the  most  interesting, 
instructive  and  easily  accessible  of  them  all  seems  never  to  have 
been  mentioned  in  print  as  a  rock  bearing  inscriptions.  Many 
of  its  sculptured  designs  are  clear  and  unmistakable.  Some  of 
them  are  as  worn  and  dim  and  present  an  appearance  of  as 
great  age  as  do  those  on  any  of  the  other  rocks  of  this  region. 
It  lies  within  less  than  ten  miles  from  Providence,  close  by  an 
estate  that  was  once  a  brilliant  centre  of  social,  intellectual  and 
political  life.  It  received  a  distinctive  name,  and  gave  its  name 
to  the  whole  neighboring  locality,  which  was  for  a  time  a  well- 
known  shore  resort.  Yet  while  Dighton  Rock  became  famous 
and  other  petroglyphs  about  the  Bay  were  joined  with  it  as 
objects  of  controversy,  this  one  slumbered  in  obscurity.  Its 
name  was  widely  enough  known,  but  only  as  applied  to  the  lo- 
cality about  it.  No  one  seems  ever  to  have  written  a  word 
about  the  rock  itself  and  the  curious  records  on  it.  Dr.  Ezra 
Stiles,  indefatigable  searcher  after  "written  rocks,"  lodged  once 
less  than  half  a  mile  away,  yet  never  heard  of  it.  Dr.  Thomas 
H.  Webb,  no  less  eager  to  discover  every  "Inscription  Rock" 
within  reach,  actually  stood  upon  it  but  could  not  see  its 
records.  How  it  could  have  been  so  near  and  so  well  known 
locally,  and  yet  have  remained  so  concealed  from  everyone  in- 
terested in  observing  and  describing  such  objects,  is  a  mystery 
as  great  as  that  of  the  origin  of  the  dispute-provoking  records 
themselves,  here  and  elsewhere.  Now  that  it  emerges  from 
its  long-guarded  retirement,  it  bids  fair  to  give  more  aid  than 
any  of  its  fellows  in  unveiling  the  mystery  that  has  clothed 
them  all. 

My  own  first  knowledge  of  it  was  due  to  Mr.  Howard  M. 

237 


o-^ 


-<-rrrc-- 


WARWlCK{e^5T5m^ 


Figure  68 — Map  of  the  Vicinity  of  Mark  Rock  in  Warwick,  R.  I. 


MARK  ROCK  IN  WARWICK  239 

Chapin,  who  had  met  with  the  usual  vague  rumors  of  its  ex- 
istence, but  learned  of  its  exact  location  only  after  much  dif- 
ficulty, many  futile  inquiries  and  long  delay.  It  is  situated  in 
the  town  of  Warwick,  on  the  west  side  of  the  Bay,  seven  miles 
distant  in  direct  line  from  the  State  House  in  Providence  and 
nearly  two  miles  farther  by  road.  The  accompanying  map. 
Figure  68,  indicates  its  exact  position.  It  may  be  reached  from 
Providence  either  by  taking  the  cars  of  the  Buttonwoods  line 
to  Cole's  Station,  or  by  following  the  highway  passing  west 
of  Pawtuxet  to  the  first  left-hand  main  branch,  which  has  been 
known  at  various  times  as  "River  Road,"  "Shawomet  Avenue," 
"Old  Mark  Rock  Road,"  and  "West  Shore  Road,"  the  latter 
being  its  present  designation.  The  "avenues"  shown  on  the 
map,  leading  eastward  to  the  shore,  are  at  present  unfinished 
roads  and  are  not  actually  named  as  the  map  indicates,  "Yale 
Avenue"  being  labeled  "Rock  Avenue,"  and  the  rest  of  them 
without  name-signs. 

The  known  history  of  the  rock  is  easily  surveyed.  Its  older 
inscriptions  must  have  been  already  long  in  existence  at  the  time 
when  Dr.  Stiles  wrote  down  in  his  Itinerary,  on  July  23,  1770, 
that  he  "rode  to  W°  Greens"  at  Occupessuatuxet,  where  he 
remained  for  the  night.  The  Widow  Greene  of  that  day  was 
Mary  Almy,  who  died  in  1777,  wife  of  John  Greene  of  the 
fourth  generation  in  Warwick,  who  died  in  1762.  Unfortu- 
nately, no  one  there  seems  to  have  known  of  his  keen  interest 
in  such  relics  and  so  did  not  inform  him  of  this  one  in  the  close 
vicinity. 

They  must  have  been  still  there  in  1835,  when  Dr.  Webb 
visited  the  spot,  but  failed  to  observe  any  inscriptions  except 
names  of  visitors.  It  is  hard  to  understand  how  he  can  have 
overlooked  them;  but  probably  he  was  expecting  to  find  them 
crowded  on  a  single  boulder,  like  Dighton  Rock,  and  thus 
missed  these  inconspicuous  designs  scattered  widely  over  a 
broad  ledge.  His  description,  given  in  a  Report  to  the  Trustees 
of  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society  on  November  16,  1835, 
is  as  follows:  "We  visited  Warwick  July  31,  1835,  in  pursuit 
of  a  marked  rock  rumored  to  be  located  there.  After  much 
fruitless  search,  we  succeeded  in  finding  the  spot  spoken  of. 


240  DIGHTON  ROCK 

but  no  Inscription  Rock  upon  it.  It  is  situated  a  short  distance 
S.  W.  of  Spring  Green  Farm,  near  the  shore,  resting  in  situ. 
It  was  probably  once  a  resort  for  fishing  or  for  clam  bakes ;  & 
the  visitors  were  in  the  practice  of  cutting  their  names  on  the 
rocks;  there  was  one  date  as  early  as  1762.  .  ,  .  This  spot  is 
spoken  of,  because  it  is  of  importance,  to  future  investigators, 
to  have  all  erroneous  rumors  corrected  as  far  as  possible,  in 
order  that  their  attention  may  be  directed  elsewhere  to  greater 
advantage." 

The  name  occurs  again  in  a  deed  of  March  26,  1847,  from 
Sarah  Cole  to  her  three  sons,  in  which  the  southeasterly  bound- 
ary of  the  property  conveyed  is  described  as  "at  the  shore  near 
the  marked  rocks  (so  called)."  Twice  only  I  have  seen  the 
name  in  print  as  applied  to  the  rock  itself,  but  unaccompanied 
by  any  description :  first  in  a  list  of  rocks  in  Warwick  given 
in  J.  R.  Cole's  History  of  Washington  and  Kent  Counties,  and 
second  on  the  map  of  1917  from  which  our  Figure  68  is  re- 
produced. 

As  a  place-name  of  the  surrounding  region,  however,  Mark 
Rock  is  not  infrequently  mentioned.  It  was  so  designated,  no 
doubt,  because,  as  Sarah  Cole's  deed  shows,  its  "marked  rocks 
(so  called)"  were  already  thus  locally  celebrated.  When  the 
name  was  first  given  to  the  locality  is  uncertain.  Webb's  report 
indicates  that  it  was  called  a  marked  rock  and  was  a  resort  for 
fishing  and  for  clam  bakes  before  1835.  Mr.  Fred  A.  Arnold 
informs  me  that  he  used  to  visit  the  place  as  early  as  1855,  when 
it  was  already  known  as  Mark  Rock  and  was  a  well-known 
smaH  shore  resort  used  for  family  parties.  In  1865,  Moses 
Greene  leased  "the  whole  length  of  Mark  Rock  Shore,"  after 
which,  with  a  change  of  lessees  in  1867,  a  wharf  was  built,  the 
steamer  What  Cheer  made  regular  trips  between  it  and  Provi- 
dence, shore  dinners  were  served,  and  it  became  a  somewhat 
noted  and  not  always  particularly  reputable  place  of  resort  until 
the  buildings  were  destroyed  by  fire  some  time  previous  to  1878. 
The  name  Mark  Rock  is  applied  to  the  locality  on  maps  between 
1872  and  1881.  "Coles"  is  given  as  an  alternative  name  on  a 
map  of  1877,  and  "Riverdale"  appears  instead  in  1895.  The 
name  Mark  Rock  seems  now  to  have  wholly  disappeared,  and 


'f  ; 


M 

E 


(^ 


MARK  ROCK  IN  WARWICK 


241 


242  DIGHTON  ROCK 

for  many  years  the  locality  has  been  known  as  Cole's  Station, 
or  simply  Coles. 

Mark  Rock  is  not  a  single  rock,  but  an  irregular  ledge, 
broken  up  into  a  group  of  more  or  less  fully  separated  frag- 
ments. Its  general  appearance  is  well  indicated  in  the  photo- 
graph of  Figure  69.  Figure  70  gives  a  plan  of  its  more  im- 
portant separate  divisions,  to  aid  in  locating  the  pictographs  and 
inscriptions  scattered  irregularly  over  the  surface.  In  length 
it  extends  about  75  feet  north  and  south,  parallel  to  the  shore, 
and  in  width  about  50  feet.  It  is  a  "graywacke"  rock,  similar 
to  most  of  the  others  in  this  region  on  which  inscriptions  have 
been  made ;  or,  more  exactly,  according  to  Professor  C.  W. 
Brown,  to  whom  samples  were  submitted,  it  is  a  medium  to 
fine  grained  gray  feldspathic  sandstone,  slightly  sheared.  Be- 
hind the  main  part  of  the  ledge  is  a  smoothly  worn  glacial 
trough,  beyond  which  a  small  section  of  rock  climbs  a  steep 
bank,  rising  beyond  the  reach  of  the  tides.  All  the  rest  is 
submerged  at  high  water,  and  wholly  exposed  at  low  tide.  The 
ledge  slopes  gently  down  eastward  toward  the  water  at  an  angle 
to  the  horizontal  plane  ranging  usually  from  ten  to  twenty 
degrees.  Most  of  the  component  rocks  are  convex  on  top  in 
the  direction  of  the  slope,  though  a  few  are  nearly  flat  and  hori- 
zontal. They  are  worn  smooth  and  striated  by  glacial  action. 
The  color  is  a  light  gray  on  the  higher  parts  where  the  action 
of  salt  water  and  its  deposits  is  least,  of  a  decidedly  reddish 
tinge  in  many  parts  of  the  middle  zone,  and  dark  gray  in  gen- 
eral on  the  lower  portions.  In  a  great  many  places,  especially  in 
the  middle  zone,  decomposition  has  so  affected  the  outer  surface 
that  it  tends  to  scale  off  at  intervals  in  thin  laminae,  thus  pro- 
ducing the  appearance  that  Stiles  and  Webb  described,  in  other 
similar  cases,  as  an  "incrustation."  Unfortunately  this  tend- 
ency has  seriously  marred  some  of  the  older  inscriptions.  All 
of  the  older  artificial  lines  are  pecked  in.  Some  are  very  dis- 
tinct and  unmistakable.  Many  others  are  faint,  illegible,  dark- 
ened to  the  color  of  the  surrounding  surface,  in  some  cases 
making  it  hard  to  tell  whether  they  are  artificial  or  natural. 
Mingled  with  them  are  also  very  many  modern  names  and 


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Figs.  71,  72,  73.     Mark  Rock  glyphs  a   (upper  left),  &    (lower  left), 
and  c  (right) 


Facing  page  242 


MARK  ROCK  IN  WARWICK  243 

initials,  some  of  them  dated,  which  are  pecked,  chiseled  or 
scratched  in,  or  painted. 

Besides  modern  names  and  initials,  I  have  found  twelve 
designs,  figures  or  groupings  of  Hnes  on  this  ledge,  distinct 
enough  to  be  recognized  as  clearly  artificial.  I  have  designated 
them  by  the  letters  a  to  k,  inclusive.  All  of  them  except  k  are 
indistinguishable  in  color  from  the  rock  itself,  so  that  except  in 
favorable  conditions  of  lighting  some  of  them  are  hard  to  dis- 
cover. This  fact,  together  with  injuries  in  some  cases  due  to 
the  scaling  off  of  parts  of  the  "incrustation,"  make  it  certain 
that  they  are  much  older  at  least  than  any  of  the  dated  names. 
But  k  looks  fresh  and  is  lighter  in  color  than  the  rock-surface. 
This  may  be  because  it  is  so  high  up  on  the  ledge  that  it  is  never 
submerged.  Still,  the  oldest  of  the  dated  names  are  also  of  a 
much  lighter  gray  than  the  surrounding  rock,  and  these  are 
covered  at  high  tide;  so  that  I  judge  that  k,  as  well  as  these, 
may  be  relatively  modern.  There  seems  to  be  no  clue  to  rela- 
tive age  in  the  width,  depth  or  manner  of  incision  of  the  lines 
of  the  different  designs.  Like  all  the  pecked  characters  of  the 
whole  region,  they  were  made  by  blows  of  a  rather  blunt  hard 
point,  of  stone  or  metal,  and  are  very  irregular  in  both  width 
and  depth.  In  width,  the  lines  vary  between  extremes  of  about 
5  to  20  millimeters,  tending  to  an  average  of  9  to  12;  and  in 
depth  they  run  for  the  most  part  from  1  to  5  millimeters,  aver- 
aging about  3. 

In  examining  the  photographs  it  must  be  remembered  that 
it  was  often  impossible  to  set  the  camera  directly  over  the  rock- 
carvings,  pointing  perpendicularly  toward  them,  as  would  have 
been  desirable;  and  consequently  these  cases  are  pictured  with 
some  degree  of  perspective  distortion.  Moreover,  the  lighting 
was  rarely  such  as  to  give  the  greatest  possible  relief  and  dis- 
tinctness, so  that  in  some  of  the  reproductions  the  lines  are 
presented  with  less  of  clearness  than  when  they  are  viewed 
on  the  rock  itself  under  the  most  favorable  conditions  of  illumi- 
nation and  point  of  view.  Whenever  close  study  left  little  or 
no  doubt  as  to  what  the  artificial  lines  actually  were,  I  rubbed 
into  them  in  most  cases  a  thin  layer  of  fine  dry  sand,  which 
renders  them  much  more  readily  visible  without  seriously  inter- 


244  DIGHTON  ROCK 

fering  with  a  minute  examination  of  their  structure  even  under 
a  magnifying  lens.  I  refrained  from  doing  this,  however,  in 
all  cases  where  I  regarded  the  lines  as  doubtful  and  also  where 
they  were  sufficiently  distinguishable  without  it.  The  approx- 
imate location  of  the  dififerent  designs  or  glyphs  should  be 
sought  by  aid  of  Figure  70.  Their  most  important  features 
are  as  follows,  dimensions  being  given  in  inches  : 

a  (Figure  71). — Apparently  an  ornamental  design.  Dif- 
ficult to  discover  in  some  lights,  but  may  be  found  by  noting 
its  relation  to  the  crack  shown  in  the  photograph.  Diameter 
of  inner  central  circle,  3^^  ;  of  outer  circle,  6^  to  8;  length  of 
the  two  attached  arms,  8  to  8j^  ;  larger  oval,  9j/2  by  13;  its 
included  circle,  3.    Photographed  from  the  north ;  sanded. 

b  (Figure  72). — A  human  head  and  bust.  Rather  hard  to 
find.  Situated  a  little  north  of  the  middle  of  its  rock-section, 
on  the  crest  of  its  steepest  slope,  three  feet  west  of  a,  five  feet 
from  north  edge  of  rock.  The  surface  here  is  much  scaled, 
pitted,  irregular  and  broken.  Head  about  4^^  by  5,  whole 
figure  7%  by  12.    Photographed  from  northeast;  sanded. 

c  (Figure  73). — Apparently  an  irregular,  complex,  mean- 
ingless grouping  of  lines;  some  suggestion  of  a  rude  human 
figure.  Covers  a  space  about  12  by  28.  Photographed  from 
northeast;  sanded. 

d  (Figure  74). — Unquestionably  many  hand-cut  lines  here, 
but  most  of  them  faint  and  uncertain,  and  the  design,  perhaps 
a  meaningless  complex,  greatly  damaged  by  extensive  scaling 
off  of  the  "incrustation."  A  space  at  least  five  feet  square  was 
apparently  covered  with  incisions.  Photographed  from  south- 
east. No  sand  used,  in  order  that  the  photograph  may  be 
studied  without  prejudice. 

e  (Figure  75). — Apparently  an  ornamental  design.  Diffi- 
cult to  discover.  On  its  particular  rock-section,  it  lies  about  in 
the  middle  from  each  to  west,  its  centre  being  two  feet  from 
the  north  edge  of  rock.  The  oval  part  measures  5^  by  8^. 
Photographed  from  directly  above ;  sanded. 

/  (Figure  76). — Apparently  a  meaningless  complex  of 
lines,  very  indistinct,  occupying  a  space  measuring  about  18  by 
30.    Impossible  to  photograph  satisfactorily.    I  have  attempted, 


Figs.  74,  75.     Mark  Rock  glyphs  d  and  £? 


Facing  page  244 


MARK  ROCK  IN  ^VARWICK  245 

however,  a  free-hand  rendition  of  the  Hnes  as  I  see  them, 
submitted  with  much  uncertainty  as  to  its  correctness. 


A 


Figure  76 — Sketch  of  probable  markings  in  position  /;  looking  northward. 


f2  (Figure  79). — This  lies  just  to  the  west  of  /.  It  contains 
a  number  of  Hnes  that  are  doubtful,  but  also,  very  clearly  dis- 
cernible, a  figure  closely  resembling  the  body  of  the  human 
figure  at  /.  There  seem  to  be  suggestions  of  a  head  with 
feathers,  of  two  arms  with  spread  fingers,  and  of  legs,  one  with 
bent  knee.    Photograph  taken  slantingly,  looking  westward. 

g  (Figure  77). — An  ornamental  scroll,  measuring  ten  by 
eleven,  with  some  neighboring  curved  lines  and  angles  less  easy 
to  decipher.  The  regularity  and  beauty  of  the  curves  is  notice- 
able. Distinct  on  the  rock,  but  not  easy  to  photograph  because 
partly  covered  by  daubs  of  paint.  Photographed  from  directly 
above ;  sanded. 

h  (Figure  78). — For  reasons  given  below,  I  class  these 
zigzags  as  "signatures."  Clearly  observable.  Together,  they 
measure  about  5  by  17.  Photographed  from  directly  above; 
sanded. 

i  (Figures  80  to  83). — A  large  section  of  the  rock-surface 
here  was  originally  covered  with  lines  and  figures,  now  greatly 
impaired  by  extensive  scaling.  Figures  80  to  82  all  show  the 
same  portion  of  the  rock  above,  toward  the  west,  and  embrace 


246  DIGHTON  ROCK 

successively  more  and  more  of  the  rock  eastward,  until  the  last 
of  them  includes  nearly  all  of  the  figured  portion  of  the  rock 
in  this  section.  Figure  83  shows  on  a  larger  scale  a  portion  of 
it  toward  the  easterly  end,  taken  with  the  camera  pointed  verti- 
cally downward.  In  this  latter  place,  the  figures  are  distinct 
except  in  the  scaled  area.  One  figure  is  somewhat  boat-shaped, 
about  1^  by  6.  Across  it,  to  the  right  of  its  centre,  runs  a  line 
slanting  upward  to  the  left  and  disappearing  in  the  scaled-off 
region;  but  it  is  fairly  certain  that  its  continuation  can  be 
traced  within  the  latter,  in  spite  of  the  scaling,  and  close  ex- 
amination makes  it  seem  probable  that  it  ends  in  an  arrow-point 
below  the  centre  of  the  small  island  of  unsealed  surface  within 
the  scaled  area.  The  whole  figure,  boat  (or  inverted  bow)  and 
arrow  together,  as  we  shall  see  later,  constitutes  a  possible 
"signature."  To  the  right  of  it  lies  what  was  once  a  definite 
and  regular  design,  but  now  so  mutilated  that  part  of  its  origi- 
nal form  and  significance  is  uncertain.  The  diameter  of  each 
circle  with  inner  dot  is  2^  inches;  the  distance  between  them, 
centre  to  centre,  is  6^  below  and  9  at  the  right.  Besides  the 
three  circles  clearly  visible  where  no  scaling  has  occurred,  a 
fourth  one  can  be  unmistakably  observed  within  the  scaled  area, 
8  inches  from  its  neighbor  to  the  right  and  83^  from  that 
below.  A  fifth  circle  lies  within,  half  on  the  scaled,  half  on 
the  unsealed  surface.  All  of  the  circles  have  inner  dots.  Join- 
ing the  two  to  the  right  is  a  straight  line  and  also,  to  its  left,  a 
second  line  triply  curved.  Between  the  two  lower  circles  is  a 
single  straight  line,  and  between  those  at  the  left  a  curved  line. 
Whether  a  line  joined  the  two  at  the  top  is  uncertain.  One 
further  line  is  distinctly  visible  curving  downward  from  the 
central  circle.  Other  uncertain  lines  are  dimly  indicated.  There 
is  even  a  faint  but  wholly  doubtful  suggestion  that  the  entire 
inner  figure  may  have  been  a  rosette  somewhat  like  that  de- 
scribed under  k,  below.  The  only  plausible  suggestion  that 
occurs  to  me  as  to  the  possible  significance  of  the  whole  figure 
is  that  it  may  have  been  the  crude  attempt  of  an  Indian,  un- 
acquainted with  the  art  of  drawing  in  perspective,  to  picture  an 
ox-cart  or  something  similar. 

The  design  pictured  in  the  three  smaller  photographs,  oc- 


Figs.  77,  78.     Alark  Rock  glyphs  g  and  /; 


Faci)ig  page  246 


MARK  ROCK  IN  WARWICK  247 

cupying  the  westerly  portion  of  this  section,  is  less  distinct, 
but  is  nevertheless  clearly  that  of  a  man.  His  head  is  in 
profile,  facing  leftward.  Feathers  run  back  to  the  right,  and 
a  long  big  nose  is  pictured  at  the  left.  The  right  arm  is  seen 
clearly  running  down  through  the  highest  scaled-off  section 
to  an  elbow,  and  thence  upward  and  leftward  through  and 
beyond  the  same  section,  ending  in  a  hand  with  spread  fingers 
on  the  unsealed  part  of  the  rock.  Through  the  same  scaled 
section  and  the  one  below  it  can  be  traced  a  body  and  the  two 
legs.  What  lies  to  the  right  of  the  figure  is  less  clear,  though 
it  includes  a  suggestion  of  a  left  arm,  possibly  holding  some- 
thing, of  which  a  U-shaped  portion  above  and  a  portion  re- 
sembling a  rayed  sun  below  are  fairly  distinguishable.  The 
figure  seems  to  represent  an  Indian,  apparently  making  the 
gesture  of  contempt  vulgarly  known  as  "thumbing  the  nose." 
If,  as  is  possible,  Miantonomi  and  his  companions  left  their 
signatures  here  about  1640,  they  may  conceivably  also  have 
drawn  this  picture  to  express  their  opinion  of  the  whites 
to  whom  they  had  sold  the  adjoining  lands ;  although  some 
other  significance  may  equally  well  have  been  intended.  The 
entire  scene  depicted,  including  the  peculiar  quadrilateral  design 
of  lines  and  circles  below,  cannot  now  be  reconstructed,  and 
interpretation  must  remain  doubtful. 

I  have  never  seen  clearer  proof  than  these  photographs 
give  of  the  fact  that  exfoliation  of  a  rock-surface  does  not 
necessarily  destroy  the  legibility  of  marks  previously  inscribed 
upon  it.  In  all  three  of  the  scaled  areas  of  i,  some  of  the  marks 
remain  nearly  as  visible  as  in  many  cases  where  no  scaling  has 
occurred ;  and  much  the  same  thing  is  true  of  f2  and  of  the 
Mount  Hope  inscription. 

y  (Figure  85). — A  rude  human  figure.  Diameter  of  head, 
2%  ;  entire  figure,  5  by  12)4.  Photographed  from  directly 
above ; sanded. 

k  (Figure  86). — An  ornamental  design,  like  a  convention- 
alized rose ;  possibly  modern.  On  highest  part  of  ledge,  above 
water.  Central  hole  is  ^  deep,  ^  diameter,  cup-shaped ;  diam- 
eter of  circle,  2;  of  total  figure,  11.  There  is  a  large  E  2y2 
inches  south  of  it,  measuring  4  by  8;  and  the  same  distance 


248  DIGHTON  ROCK 

northwest  of  it  is  an  S,  5  by  9.  Photographed  from  above;  not 
sanded. 

/. — This  is  a  large,  regularly  shaped  half -circumference, 
closed  below  by  its  28-inch  diameter;  within,  near  the  top,  is  a 
well-formed  picture  of  an  anchor,  and  along  the  diameter  is 
written  the  name  "Philip  Greene,"  followed  by  the  representa- 
tion of  a  plough.  It  is  situated  at  the  edge  of  the  glacial 
trough,  and  the  lower  part  of  it,  including  the  name,  is  ordi- 
narily covered  by  sand.  It  was  made  probably  by  Philip,  born 
in  1806  and  married  in  1832,  son  of  Thomas  Lippitt  Greene. 
Although  not  so  stated  in  the  family  history,  he  seems  to  have 
indicated  by  his  pictures  that  he  combined  the  occupations  of 
his  father,  a  mariner,  and  of  his  grandfather,  a  farmer.  The 
actual  date  of  the  inscription  was  very  likely  1827,  coincidently 
with  two  dated  inscriptions,  one  of  which  also  pictures  an 
anchor.  The  lines  are  pecked  in,  but  are  narrower  and  shal- 
lower than  most  of  those  in  the  older  inscriptions,  being  3  to 
6  millimeters  wide  and  2  to  3  millimeters  deep. 

m. — The  name  and  date,  "S.  Low,  1827."  It  is  scratched 
in,  not  pecked,  with  lines  less  than  3  millimeters  wide  and  2  to 
3  deep. 

n. — "I.  W.  Greene  Oct.  14,  1827"  followed  by  an  anchor. 
Lines  scratched  in,  2  millimeters  or  less  wide  and  deep.  This 
was  very  likely  John  Wickes  Greene  of  the  Stone  Castle  in  Old 
Warwick,  born  1809,  married  1831.  I  have  found  no  state- 
ment concerning  his  occupation,  but  his  father,  Robert  W.,  is 
described  as  a  farmer  and  captain  in  the  merchant  marine.  This 
probably  accounts  for  the  anchor. 

o.  Various  early  names  and  initials. — Webb  found  one 
name  recorded  as  early  as  1762.  The  earliest  that  I  find,  be- 
sides those  just  described  (/,  m,  n),  are  in  this  location  o.  They 
include:  "WG  1775;"  "A.  Low  1776;"  "Mary  A.  Waterman 
July  5th  AD.  1830;"  "H.  Waterman  June  1831 ;"  "Stephen  A. 
Lockwood  Au  19  1837."  In  the  section  called  d,  not  far  from 
these,  is  the  name  "F.  M.  Waterman"  accompanied  by  a  well 
executed  drawing  that  probably  represented  a  spread-eagle  with 
scroll.  The  figure  was  drawn  with  such  shallow  lines,  however, 
that  they  are  badly  worn  and  many  of  them  wholly  obliterated, 


■..^i^J"^^  A.-^^ 


Fis.  79 


Fig.  80 


Fig.  81 


Fig.  82 


Figs.  79,  80,  81,  82.     Mark  Rock  glyphs  f2   (upper  left) 
and  I   (remaining  three) 


Facing  page  248 


MARK  ROCK  IN  WARWICK  249 

and  I  have  thought  that  possibly  it  may  have  been  a  winged 
death's-head  such  as  was  often  carved  on  gravestones.  I  dis- 
cover no  date  for  this  signature,  but  there  may  have  been  one, 
possibly  the  1762  seen  by  Webb,  now  wholly  worn  away. 

p. — Numerous  more  recent  initials  of  no  particular  interest. 

Since  there  is  considerable  difficulty  in  seeing  the  pictures 
correctly  in  the  photographs  without  prolonged  and  microscopic 
study,  I  present  in  Figure  84  the  appearance  of  all  of  the 
human  figures  on  Mark  Rock,  as  I  see  them.  They  are  not 
drawn  in  correct  proportion,  because  the  photographs  neces- 
sarily distort  them  perspectively ;  and  I  am  doubtful  about  many 
of  the  lines.  There  seem  to  have  been  some  other  human 
fiigures  in  d  and  perhaps  in  c,  but  there  they  are  particularly 
hard  to  make  out. 

Although  we  have  no  mention  of  Mark  Rock  or  of  the 
"marked  rocks,"  printed  or  documentary,  earlier  than  1835,  the 
dates  on  the  rock  itself  carry  it  back  as  a  place  for  records  to 
1762.  But  every  one  of  the  glyphs  which  we  have  described 
under  the  designations  a  to  /  is  unquestionably  much  more 
ancient  than  this.  The  later  ones  are  all  clear,  fresh  and 
distinct,  of  a  decidedly  lighter  grayness  than  that  of  the  un- 
touched rock,  although  they  are  narrower  and  more  shallow 
than  the  older  ones ;  while  the  latter  are  dulled  to  the  grayness 
of  the  rock,  often  look  indistinct  and  difficult  to  distinguish 
from  the  natural  striae  and  pittings,  and  are  frequently  badly 
dilapidated  by  time.  Many  of  them,  too,  are  of  unquestionably 
Indian  type,  and  therefore,  since  they  clearly  show  that  they  are 
not  modern  imitations,  are  probably  as  old  as  early  Colonial 
times  at  least.  These  eleven  first-named  designs  or  groups 
include  three  irregular  and  apparently  meaningless  complexes 
of  lines,  c,  d  and  /;  three  ornamental  designs,  a,  e  and  g,  of  a 
regularity,  beauty  and  skill  in  execution  rare  in  the  case  of  In- 
dians, who  may  or  may  not  have  been  the  originators  of  all  of 
them ;  two  or  three  regular  designs  with  probably  definite  sym- 
bolism, including  a  dilapidated  and  therefore  uninterpretable 
collection  of  lines  and  circles  in  i;  four  human  figures,  h,  f2, 
i  and  ;',  and  possibly  others  in  c  and  d;  and  three  characters 
that  we  have  said  may  possibly  be  signatures.     Leaving  the 


250  DIGHTON  ROCK 

complexes  unanalyzed,  this  makes  about  fifteen  discoverable 
designs  in  all,  not  including  those  lettered  k  to  p. 

The  irregular  complexes  are  probably  what  they  appear  to 
be,  mere  meaningless  scribblings,  products  of  an  unguided  urge- 
to-do  something.  Our  own  children  turn  out  something  closely 
similar  in  their  ignorant  attempts  to  draw  or  to  imitate  grown 
people's  writing.  It  is  not  by  any  means  improbable  that  in 
these  rock-scribblings  uninstructed  red  men  may  have  been  sim- 
ilarly trying  to  imitate  what  they  had  seen  white  men  do ;  but 
of  this  we  cannot,  of  course,  be  certain. 

The  human  figure  in  /  closely  resembles  that  on  the  rock  at 
Tiverton.  The  diagonal  lines  across  the  breast,  and  the  prom- 
inent "buttons,"  strongly  suggest  a  military  uniform.  It  may 
wtII  be  that  Indians  attempted  thus  to  picture  a  white  soldier  of 
early  Colonial  days,  an  impressive  object  in  the  experience  of 
the  aborigines.  The  militia  of  those  days  wore  no  regular  uni- 
form, it  is  true,  but  they  did  have  to  carry  powder-flask,  pouch 
for  shot,  provisions,  and  sometimes  sword  or  bayonet,  and  these 
were  supported  often  by  straps  crossed  over  the  breast.^  If 
this  is  the  meaning  of  the  rock-picture,  it  helps  to  fix  the  prob- 
able approximate  date  of  these  pictographs. 

This  indication  of  a  definite  date  gains  strength  from  the 
three  designs  that  I  have  classed  as  possible  signatures.  As  to 
whether  they  are  truly  such  or  not,  it  would  be  unwise  to  ven- 
ture too  confident  a  judgment.  Indians  often  affixed  marks 
as  signatures  to  deeds  and  similar  papers,  A  very  few  of  them, 
perhaps  including  Philip  with  his  P,  may  have  adopted  a  definite 
design  characteristic  of  the  individual  and  invariably  used  by 
him.  But  most  of  them  seem  to  have  made  a  more  or  less  dif- 
ferent mark  every  time  they  signed,  and  different  individuals 
often  used  similar  marks.  Many  examples  of  such  signatures 
are  reproduced  in  Chapin's  Documentary  History  of  Rhode 
Island.  Among  them,  the  following,  made  between  1637  and 
1645,  may  have  some  bearing  upon  our  discussion  and  may 
serve  as  illustrations  of  the  mingled  variability  and  similarity  in 
practice.     On  five  papers,  Canonicus  signed  with  a  bow-shaped 

1  E.  McClennan,  Historic  Dress  in  America,  i.  346.  Alice  Morse  Earle, 
Two  Centuries  of  Costume  in  Avicrica,  pp.  685-687. 


-ys^^jB^- 


Fig    83.      ^Fark   Rock   glyphs   in   iiosition    j 


Fig.  84.     Probable  appearance  of  drawings  of  human  figures 
on  Mark  Rock 


Facing  page  250 


MARK  ROCK  IN  WARWICK  251 

figure  twice,  differing  bow-and-arrow  shapes  twice,  and  an- 
other design  once.  Nine  of  Miantonomi's  marks  are  shown, 
all  differing  from  one  another  though  with  some  resemblances : 
an  arrow  four  times,  a  bow-and-arrow  twice,  and  entirely  dif- 
ferent figures  three  times.  Socononoco  signed  with  differing 
bow-and-arrow  figures  four  times.  At  least  three  other 
sachems  used  a  bow-and-arrow  mark  during  the  same  period, 
practically  always  with  differences  in  detail.  The  arrow  is  rep- 
resented sometimes  by  a  straight  or  curved  line  only,  sometimes 
as  ending  in  an  arrow-point.  Usually  the  arrow  is  drawn  start- 
ing naturally  from  the  string,  and  crossing  over  and  projecting 
beyond  the  curve  of  the  bow.  But  in  one  case,  illustrated 
below,  the  straight  string  is  uppermost  and  the  arrow,  starting 
from  it,  projects  upward  away  from  the  curve.  Of  course 
marks  of  many  other  shapes  were  used,  besides  those  here 
mentioned. 


A^ 


Figure  87 — Indian  Marks  or  Signatures  :  of  Weshaganesett  (upper  left), 
Wonimenatony  (lower  left),  Miantonomi  (middle),  and  Socononoco  (right). 

Four  Indian  signatures  are  reproduced  in  Figure  87..  The 
first  of  them  is  that  of  Weshaganesett,  and  the  second  that  of 
Wonimenatony,  as  they  appear  on  papers  signed  at  Aquidneck 
in  1639.  The  third  is  the  way  in  which  "Myantonomey,"  chief 
of  the  Narragansetts,  wrote  his  mark  on  the  deed  of  the  lands 
of  Shawomet  to  John  Greene  and  others,  12  January  1642-3. 
The  fourth  is  the  mark  of  Socononoco  as  on  the  deed  of  Occu- 
pessuatuxet  to  John  Greene  in  1642.^  It  will  be  seen  that  the 
two  parts  of  h  on  the  rock  (Figure  78)  are  as  nearly  exact  dup- 
licates of  the  signatures  of  the  two  first-named  Indians  as  any 
two  signatures  of  an  Indian  are  of  one  another.  The  third  sig- 
nature greatly  resembles  the  lowest  left-hand  design  on  i  (Fig- 

2  H.  M.  Chapin,  Documentary  History  of  Rhode  Island,  i.  167,  170,  ii.  73. 


252  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ure  83),  not  only  in  its  inverted  bow  or  boat-like  shape,  but 
also  in  respect  to  the  line  running  from  it  and  ending  in  an 
arrow-point.  These  resemblances  suggest  strongly  that  this 
bow-like  design  on  the  rock  may  have  been  made  by  Mian- 
tonomi  or  Socononoco,  who  sold  the  adjoining  lands  in  1642, 
or  by  some  other  sachem  who  was  accustomed  to  sign  his  name 
in  this  manner.  We  thus  have  three  cases  of  close  correspon- 
dence between  rock-carvings  and  documentary  signatures.  One 
instance  of  such  resemblance  might  well  be  attributed  to  chance. 
This  may  be  the  explanation  of  them  all ;  yet  it  is  entirely  pos- 
sible that  the  two  sachems  of  Aquidneck,  and  one  or  more  of 
the  other  Indians  mentioned,  having  learned  from  the  whites 
to  use  these  marks,  at  some  time  not  far  removed  from  1640 
may  have  thus  carved  their  name-symbols  upon  the  surface  of 
this  rock. 

I  have  enquired  of  residents  near  the  rock  as  to  whether  any 
local  legends  or  theories  survive  concerning  it.  The  only  indi- 
cation of  such  that  I  have  found  was  related  to  me  by  Col.  H. 
Irving  King  of  Apponaug.  He  writes:  "The  only  legend  in 
regard  to  'Mark  Rock'  is  that  it  was  inscribed  by  the  Norsemen 
and  that  the  inscription  is  similar  to  that  on  the  Dighton  Rock. 
This  is  the  belief  among  the  remnants  of  the  old  settlers  of 
Old  Warwick.  In  the  Greene  family  I  know  the  Norse  legend 
still  persists.  In  my  early  youth  in  this  village  I  heard  Indian 
legends  about  a  great  number  of  places  in  the  town  but  never  a 
word  about  'Mark  Rock'  in  connection  with  the  aborigines. 
The  ascription  of  the  marking  on  the  rock  to  the  Northmen  is 
evidently  a  transference  of  the  myth — if  it  is  a  myth — of  the 
Dighton  Rock  to  the  one  at  Cole's  Station." 

There  is  no  doubt  that  there  is  no  more  reason  to  attribute 
the  inscriptions  on  New  England  rocks  to  Norsemen  than  to 
Phoenicians  or  Druids.  The  Warwick  rock  itself  proves  the 
mixed  Indian  and  white- American  origin  of  its  markings,  more 
clearly  and  certainly  than  is  the  case  with  any  others  of  the 
rocks  that  we  have  studied.  It  is  thus  the  most  illuminating  and 
instructive  of  them  all.  It  has  lain  at  our  door  with  its  lessons, 
in  all  probability,  as  long  as  any  of  them.  But  it  has  eluded  all 
scientific  observers,  so  that  only  now  can  its  lessons  be  read. 


■^-SSuS  K  ■«' 


Figs.  85,  86.     Mark  Rock  glyphs  /  and  k 


Facing  page  252 


MARK  ROCK  IN  WARWICK  253 

Among  these,  the  following  at  least  are  important  probabilities 
— I  do  not  speak  of  them  as  certainties,  for  in  a  field  like  this  it 
is  difficult  to  speak  of  many  conclusions  as  absolutely  sure: 

1.  The  markings  are  scattered,  individual,  unrelated,  like 
the  modern  initials.  They  do  not  tell  a  single  connected  story. 
Many  an  attempt  has  been  made  to  force  the  characters  on 
Dighton  Rock  to  do  this,  but  such  unified  interpretations  of  it 
are  all  futile.  On  the  other  hand,  it  has  been  surmised,  by 
myself  and  others,  but  without  complete  proof,  that  the  carv- 
ings on  nearly  all  these  rocks,  however  crowded  together  on 
one  surface,  were  made  by  many  different  individuals,  on  dif- 
ferent occasions,  through  a  considerable  period  of  time.  We 
may  say  that  this  is  practically  proven  for  Mark  Rock,  and 
thus  its  probability  in  the  other  cases  is  greatly  strengthened. 

2.  There  is  good  reason  for  believing  that  the  Portuguese 
explorer,  Miguel  Cortereal,  may  have  been  the  first  to  use 
Dighton  Rock  as  a  recording  surface,  in  1511,  and  that  later 
the  Indians,  following  his  example,  acquired  the  habit  of  doing 
the  same.  It  seems  not  unlikely  that  Indians,  again  following 
the  example  of  white  men's  writings,  first  made  use  of  Mark 
Rock's  tempting  surface  sometime  between  1620  and  1650, 
and  that  the  practice  continued  at  intervals,  ending  probably 
with  the  scattering  of  the  race  at  the  close  of  King  Philip's 
War. 

3.  Some  of  the  marks  here,  due  to  the  Indians,  are  almost 
certainly  meaningless  scribblings,  and  others  equally  meaning- 
less decorative  designs.  Our  already  expressed  belief  that  this 
is  true  in  other  cases  thus  gains  support. 

4.  Very  few  of  the  marks  here  seem  to  have  any  possible 
symbolic  significance.  Where  such  exists,  it  is  individual  and 
trivial,  either  a  name,  or  an  object  like  the  soldier  that  had  at- 
tracted interested  attention.  There  is  no  story  told,  no  histor- 
ical event  indicated,  no  information  conveyed.  This  is  not  true, 
of  course,  of  all  Indian  writings ;  but,  so  far  as  I  have  studied 
them,  it  seems  to  apply  to  a  great  many  of  their  petroglyphic 
efforts  everywhere.  It  is  not  impossible  that  the  obliterated 
portions  of  the  records  here  may  have  contained  some  small 
feature  conveying  more  elaborate  meaning.    There  is  no  indica- 


254  DIGHTON  ROCK 

tion  of  it  now,  except  that  in  case  of  the  human  figure  and  the 
quadrilateral  of  lines  and  circles  in  i  I  have  a  persistent  impres- 
sion that  they  were  meant  to  indicate  some  particular  idea,  more 
elaborate  than  usual.  Yet  even  so,  whether  the  ideas  were  more 
or  less  like  those  of  disparaging  gesture  and  of  ox-cart  that  I 
have  suggested  for  them,  or  were  wholly  different,  it  seems 
probable  that  it  was  still  merely  individual  and  trivial. 

5.  If  our  surmise  about  the  signatures  is  correct,  then  some 
of  the  marks  are  provably  of  Indian  origin,  and  of  early  Co- 
lonial date.  The  figures  which,  here  and  elsewhere,  probably 
represent  Colonial  soldiers,  and  our  interpretation  of  the 
scribblings  as  inspired  by  white  example,  point  with  some  force 
to  the  same  conclusion.  The  belief  that  Indians,  some  at  least, 
if  not  all,  in  early  Colonial  times,  were  responsible  for  the 
puzzling  and  much  controverted  markings  on  all  the  other  rocks 
of  the  region,  thus  gains  strength. 

6.  White  men,  after  the  Indians  had  gone,  and  because  the 
Indians  had  begun  the  practice,  carved  not  only  their  names  and 
initials  here,  but  also  occasionally  ornamental  and  symbolic 
designs,  as  is  shown  by  the  plough,  anchors  and  eagle.  Some 
of  the  earlier  and  better  executed  scrolls,  and  the  rosette  at  k, 
may  have  been  made  by  them  instead  of  by  Indians,  but  this  is 
not  sure.  In  like  manner  they  carved  initials,  at  least,  in  other 
localities,  on  all  similar  rocks  to  which  their  attention  has  been 
drawn.  Those  at  Tiverton  have  thus  far  providentially 
escaped. 

If  these  conclusions,  all  or  most  of  them,  can  be  accepted, 
then  it  is  true  that  Mark  Rock,  so  easily  accessible  yet  so  curi- 
ously elusive  heretofore,  contributes  a  great  deal  toward  the 
solution  of  many  perplexing  questions  about  the  numerous 
written  rocks  of  this  region  that  could  not  be  decisively  an- 
swered without  its  aid. 


CHAPTER  XV 

MISCELLANEOUS  INSCRIBED  ROCKS  AND  STONES 

We  have  found  seven  rocks  or  groups  of  rocks  with  carved 
inscriptions,  about  Narragansett  Bay.  There  remain  a  great 
many  more  reported  instances  in  New  England  to  examine, 
some  of  them  still  within  the  Narragansett  Basin  or  near 
enough  to  belong  to  the  same  cultural  region,  and  others  else- 
where. Many  of  the  reports  will  turn  out  to  be  mistaken,  and 
the  genuine  cases  will  require  less  of  detailed  description  than 
those  which  have  occupied  us  thus  far. 

1.  Gardner's  Point  Rock. — There  seems  to  have  been  once 
an  inscribed  rock  at  Gardner's  Point  on  Mattapoisett  Neck  in 
Swansea,  which  has  long  since  disappeared.  We  are  indebted 
to  Dr.  Webb  for  the  single  extant  account  of  it.  He  first 
alluded  to  its  existence  in  his  letter  to  Rafn  on  September  22, 
1830.  But  when  he  sought  to  discover  it  somewhat  later,  he 
failed  in  the  attempt,  and  shortly  sent  to  Rafn  a  full  description 
of  the  circumstances,  in  his  letter  of  October  31,  1835.  He 
had  first  learned  of  it  about  1820  from  a  Mr.  Gardner  of 
Dighton,  who,  then  eighty  years  old  and  living  near  Dighton 
Rock,  "recollected  perfectly  well  of  seeing,  when  a  boy,  a  simi- 
lar rock"  on  his  father's  farm  in  Swansea.  On  August  fifth, 
1835,  Dr.  Webb  visited  Swansea  in  company  with  John  R. 
Bartlett.  "We  traced  the  shore  along  for  some  distance,  but 
unsuccessfully.  Mr.  Gardner,  aet.  70,  who  owns  the  last  farm 
on  the  Point,  and  is  brother  to  the  one  already  spoken  of,  had 
an  indistinct  recollection  of  having  seen  a  rock  on  the  east  side 
of  the  Point,  about  one  fourth  of  a  mile  from  its  extremity, 
which  had  marks  on  it,  'but  none,'  as  he  observed,  'that  would 
be  read;'  this  he  thinks  was  broken  up  20  years  ago  or  more. 
We  searched  for  it,  but  in  vain." 

2.  Warren  Banner  Stone. — Double-edged  and  perforated 

255 


256  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Indian  stones  of  axe-like  appearance  are  not  rare,  and  are 
commonly  known  as  bannerstones.  Indian  incisions  on  im- 
plements as  well  as  rocks  are  of  frequent  occurrence,  but  they 
consist  usually  of  pictographs  or  of  decorative  lines,  and  au- 
thentic specimens  whose  lines  resemble  alphabetic  characters 
are  exceedingly  rare.  The  combination  of  axe-like  shape, 
double  blade,  perforation  for  hafting,  and  inscribed  characters 
suggesting  a  possible  alphabetic  or  ideographic  significance  is 
apparently  wholly  unique.  A  specimen  possessing  these  char- 
acteristics, however,  is  now  in  the  Museum  of  the  American 
Indian,  Heye  Foundation,  in  New  York,  and  came  originally 
from  somewhere  in  this  region. 

Unfortunately  the  history  of  this  stone  is  not  entirely  clear. 
About  ten  years  ago  it  came  into  the  possession  of  the  late 
Charles  R.  Carr  of  Warren,  Rhode  Island,  from  a  source  now 
unknown.  The  most  probable  account  of  it  now  obtainable  is 
that  it  was  discovered  by  someone  who  was  clamming  on  the 
Kickamuit  river  in  Warren,  somewhere  north  of  the  Narrows, 
and  that  he  sold  or  gave  it  to  a  man  in  Tiverton  or  Fall  River, 
from  whom  in  turn  Mr.  Carr  obtained  it. 

The  stone  is  pictured  in  Figure  88  from  photographs  for 
which  I  am  indebted  to  Professor  Foster  H.  Saville  of  the 
above-named  Museum.  It  is  a  granitoid  pebble  somewhat 
sharpened  on  both  of  the  edges  or  blades  by  a  slight  degree  of 
rubbing.  A  perforation,  about  one-half  inch  in  diameter,  ex- 
tends through  the  middle  where  the  stone  is  thickest.  It  ap- 
pears to  have  been  made,  not  by  a  rotary  drill,  but  by  the  use 
of  a  steel  tool  with  pressure.  The  stone  measures  about  5  5/8 
hy  3y2  inches,  with  a  greatest  thickness  of  1^  inch.  The 
incised  lines  are  1/32  to  1/16  inch  deep  and  an  average  of 
1/12  inch  in  width.  The  inscription  consists  of  four  characters 
on  one  face  of  the  specimen;  and,  on  the  other  face,  the  two 
middle  characters  of  the  first  face  repeated  and  joined  together 
by  a  circle. 

It  is  generally  agreed  that  bannerstones  were  used  for  cere- 
monial purposes  only,  and  that  they  possessed  some  symbolical 
significance.  There  is  no  agreement  as  to  the  meaning  of  the 
symbolism,  and  most  authorities  venture  no  opinion  except 


ir.  E 

is 


MISCELLANEOUS  INSCRIBED  ROCKS        257 

that  it  was  religious  in  nature.  Dr.  George  B.  Gordon  sug- 
gests the  possibility  that  the  stones  represented  originally  a 
whale's  tail  and  symbolized  the  whale  as  an  important  source 
of  food  to  the  tribes  among  whom  the  use  of  these  objects 
originated.  W.  K.  Moorehead,  on  the  other  hand,  considers  it 
probable  that,  mounted  on  a  staff  with  eagle's  head  and 
feathers,  they  represented  the  thunder-bird.  Some  writers 
have  even  suggested  their  practical  use,  not  as  axes,  but  as 
counterweights  on  fire-drills  and  perforation-drills,  or  as  hair 
ornaments.  But  a  purely  ceremonial  use  of  some  kind  may 
be  most  plausibly  assigned  to  our  stone. 

In  the  opinion  of  Miss  Virginia  Baker, ^  Philip's  village 
was  not  at  Mount  Hope  but  near  the  Narrows  of  Kickamuit 
River.  One  of  the  characters  on  the  stone  resembles  the  P 
which  Philip  always  used  as  his  signature  to  official  documents, 
and  the  remaining  characters  suggest  some  alphabetic  or  ideo- 
graphic significance.  If  the  incisions  and  perforation  were 
made  by  a  steel  tool,  as  is  probable,  and  if  it  is  of  genuine  In- 
dian origin,  which  no  one  who  has  examined  it  seems  to  have 
doubted,  then  this  object  was  fashioned  almost  certainly  some- 
time between  1620  and  1675,  and  may  well  have  been  a  cere- 
monial stone  belonging  to  Philip  himself.  If  so,  then  we  might 
very  plausibly  infer  that  the  whole  inscription  on  one  side  may 
have  been  meant  to  signify  something  like  "Philip,  Chief 
Sachem  of  the  Wampanoags."  The  repetition  of  the  same 
characters  on  the  other  side  within  a  circle  might  then  have 
been  intended  as  a  sort  of  royal  coat-of-arms  or  heraldic  de- 
vice, signifying  "Wampanoag  royal  property,"  or  "tribal  em- 
blem." As  an  exact  interpretation,  this  is,  of  course,  pure 
guess-work ;  but  whether  it  is  right  or  not,  some  meaning  surely 
attached  to  the  characters. 

In  the  Table  (Figure  42)  which  was  given  in  our  chapter 
on  the  Moimt  Hope  Rock,  the  characters  on  this  Warren  stone 
were  compared  with  those  on  two  other  stones  bearing  inscrip- 
tions which  have  been  attributed  to  Indians.  One  of  these  was 
the  Pemberton  Axe,  found  in  1859  in  New  Jersey;  but  Mr. 
C.  C.  Willoughby  doubts  if  its  incisions  are  of  Indian  work- 

1  Massasoit's  Town,  1904,  p.  24. 


258  DIGHTON  ROCK 

manship.  The  other  stone  was  a  tablet  found  in  a  mound  in 
Tennessee,  whose  engraved  characters  were  regarded  by  Cyrus 
Thomas  as  "beyond  question  letters  of  the  Cherokee  alphabet." 
Things  like  these  are  too  few  and  too  dubious  to  permit  any 
very  confident  conclusions.  But  there  is  no  question  that  a 
Cherokee  system  of  writing,  in  syllabic  characters,  was  devised 
as  a  native  product  early  in  the  nineteenth  century,  and  there  is 
very  little  doubt  that  it  was  used  on  the  rock  near  Mount  Hope. 
It  is  at  least  possible  that,  after  long  intercourse  with  the 
whites,  similar  spontaneous  impulses  toward  devising  a  native 
system  of  writing  may  have  arisen  much  earlier,  and  that  the 
Warren  bannerstone  is  a  real  example  of  the  use  of  such  a 
system  that  may  have  been  in  process  of  development  among 
the  Indians  of  this  region,  perhaps  during  the  time  of  King 
Philip.  If  we  were  surer  of  the  circumstances  of  its  discovery 
and  that  it  was  an  indubitable  Indian  product,  we  could  make 
such  a  statement  with  greater  confidence. 

3.  Dighton  Headstone  (Figure  89). — A  headstone  to  an 
Indian  grave  in  Dighton,  now  in  the  Museum  of  the  Old 
Colony  Historical  Society  in  Taunton,  furnishes  a  proof  that 
Indians,  under  white  influence,  learned  to  carve  inscriptions  on 
stone,  or  else  that  a  white  man  did  it  for  them  in  ideographic 
symbols  that  would  be  intelligible  to  them  with  a  little  explana- 
tion. In  its  upper  line  is  an  Indian's  head  between  the  Greek 
letters  Chi  and  Upsilon,  which  are  supposed  to  stand  for  Chris- 
ton  Huios, — son  of  Christ.  The  whole  line  therefore  reads : 
"Here  lies  a  Christian  Indian."  Next  below  is  an  arrow 
pointing  toward  a  rectangle  enclosing  an  X ;  and  this  rather 
clearly  means:  "The  aim  of  his  life  was  toward  the  Banner 
of  the  Cross."  Below  this  is  an  Indian  pipe,  undoubtedly  mean- 
ing in  this  context :  "May  he  rest  in  peace."  Then  follows  a 
Greek  letter  Delta,  possibly  the  initial  of  Samuel  Danforth, 
minister  at  Taunton,  who  converted  many  Indians  to  the  Chris- 
tian faith.  Finally,  the  figures  68  are  clear,  and  were  probably 
part  of  the  complete  date  1687,  1688  or  1689,  the  earliest  years 
of  Danforth's  ministry.  This  interpretation  was  given  me  by 
the  late  James  E.  Seaver,  secretary  of  the  Old  Colony  Historical 


Fig.  89.      .A   pictofiraphic   headstone-    foiiiui   in    Hig^hton,    ^^ass. 


Fig.  90.     Indian  inscription  carved  upon  a  small  houlder  found  in 
\A'est  Wrentham,  Mass. 


Faciiiii  page  25S 


MISCELLANEOUS  INSCRIBED  ROCKS        259 

Society.     It  is  not  known  who  first  suggested  it,  but  it  is  so 
obvious  that  it  is  almost  surely  correct. 

4.  West  Wrentham  Stone. — A  small  stone,  about  ten  inches 
in  its  long  diameter,  was  found  about  seventy-five  years  ago 
at  West  Wrentham,  within  the  Narragansett  basin,  at  a  spot 
known  as  the  home  of  the  last  local  native.  It  has  been  fully 
described  by  Professor  Harris  H.  Wilder."  His  reproductions 
of  its  incisions  (Figure  90)  convince  one  that  if  they  were 
intended  to  convey  a  definite  meaning,  the  symbolic  devices 
employed  were  not  of  a  character  that  could  have  been  widely 
understood,  but  were  more  likely  random  inventions  of  the  in- 
dividual maker,  or  at  most  of  local  and  temporary  significance 
only.  They  look,  however,  like  haphazard  and  meaningless 
scribblings.  Wilder  does  not  question  their  Indian  origin,  and 
hesitatingly  suggests  that  they  may  have  had  some  ritualistic 
use. 

5.  Long  Island  Tablet. — A  small  tablet  of  hard  sandstone 
with  engraved  figures  on  both  sides  was  found  about  forty 
years  ago  on  a  shell  heap  at  Eagle  Neck,  Orient,  at  the  easterly 
end  of  Long  Island.  It  is  now  in  the  Museum  of  the  American 
Indian,  Heye  Foundation,  in  New  York.  The  stone  measures 
about  7  by  4^  inches,  with  a  thickness  of  about  %  of  an  inch. 
One  side  of  it  has  been  described  and  pictured  by  Dr.  Daniel  G. 
Brinton.^  From  the  casts  that  were  submitted  to  him,  he  was 
unable  to  decipher  what  was  upon  the  other  side.  Both  sides 
are  here  shown  in  Figures  92  and  93,  after  drawings  carefully 
made  from  the  stone  itself  by  Daniel  A.  Young  of  the  Museum. 
I  can  add  nothing,  except  the  drawing  of  the  second  side,  to 
the  description  and  estimate  that  Brinton  gave  of  it.  After 
naming  the  figures  in  order  as  probably  those  of  a  man,  canoe, 
deer,  bow  and  arrow,  footprint  of  bear,  sign  of  fire,  unknown 
object,  fish,  eel,  vague  lines,  and  wigwam,  he  says : 

It  seems  to  be  the  record  of  a  hunting  and  fishing  excursion 
of  little  importance,  which  the  writer  may  have  amused  himself 
in  inscribing  on  a  piece  of  stone  simply  because  it  was  suited  to 

2  "A  Petroglyph  from  Eastern  Massachusetts ;"  in  American  Anthro- 
pologist, 1911,  xiii.  65. 

^The  Archaeologist   (Waterloo,  Indiana),  1893,  i.  201. 


260  DIGHTON  ROCK 

the  purpose;  or,  it  may  have  been  a  mnemonic  aid  to  retain  in 
the  memory  the  words  of  some  hunting  song  or  medicine  chant, 
intended  to  propitiate  the  divinities  vi^ho  confer  or  deny  success 
in  fishing  or  the  chase.  Whatever  it  may  have  been,  I  see  nothing 
in  it  to  convict  it  as  spurious ;  nor,  on  the  other  hand,  anything  to 
indicate  that  it  was  a  record  of  a  matter  of  moment. 

6.  Denison  Tablet. — From  somewhere  in  Rhode  Island 
came  a  stone  whose  two  sides  are  pictured  in  Figure 
91.  It  was  formerly  in  the  Jenks  Museum  of  Brown 
University,  which  was  closed  some  twenty-five  or  thirty 
years  ago.  Its  former  contents  were  recently  redis- 
tributed, and  this  stone  is  now  in  possession  of  the  Rhode 
Island  Historical  Society.  It  is  of  some  slaty  material,  meas- 
uring about  6  by  3^  inches,  with  a  thickness  tapering  regularly 
from  nearly  an  inch  down  to  a  rough  irregular  blunt  edge  of 
about  ^  inch.  The  inscribed  figures  are  very  unlike  the 
shallow  irregular  pecked  ones  of  known  Indian  origin  in  this 
region.  On  one  side  is  a  shield-like  figure  whose  incisions  are 
smooth,  of  half-round  section,  almost  uniformly  3  millimeters 
deep;  also  a  very  shallow  design,  resembling  the  Ace  of  Spades. 
On  the  other  side  is  another  very  regularly  and  exactly  formed 
figure  of  similar  uniformity  and  smoothness,  4  millimeters 
deep;  and  two  shallower  circles,  evidently  drawn  with  a  com- 
pass. These  features  make  it  doubtful  that  it  can  have  been 
the  work  of  Indians :  but  if  it  was,  it  seems  to  me  that  it  must 
have  been  very  late  and  the  result  of  skill  derived  from  white 
men's  teachings.  Nothing  whatever  is  known  about  the  stone 
except  what  is  revealed  by  its  label,  which  mistakenly  calls  it 
an  "Inscribed  Semilunar  Knife,"  says  that  it  is  from  Rhode 
Island  and  was  presented  by  Rev.  F.  Denison.  This  Mr.  Deni- 
son lived  in  Westerly,  and  made  many  contributions  to  the 
Jenks  Museum  of  specimens  gathered  by  him  between  1865 
and  1872,  most  of  which  were  found  somewhere  in  the  region 
between  New  London  and  Newport. 

7.  Scaticook,  Connecticut. — On  October  7,  1789,  Dr.  Stiles 
observed  and  copied  what  he  believed  was  an  ancient  Phoenician 
inscription  in  Connecticut,  but  no  one  has  yet  confirmed  his 


Fig.    91.       The    Dcnnison    Tal)k-t 
found  in  southerly  Rhode  Island 


Fig.  93 
Figs.  92,  93.     Inscribed  Tablet  found  at  Orient,  Long  Island 


Faciiiy  page  260 


MISCELLANEOUS  INSCRIBED  ROCKS        261 

discovery.  His  description  of  it  is  in  the  Memoir  of  1790,  of 
which  we  spoke  in  an  earlier  chapter.  The  manuscript  paper 
and  accompanying  drawings  are  preserved  in  the  library  of  the 
American  Academy  of  Arts  and  Sciences  in  Boston.  Some 
portions  of  it,  quoted  by  Webb,  have  been  published  in  Antiq- 
uitates  AmericancB,  and  others  by  Kendall  in  his  Travels.  The 
following  account  is  condensed  from  the  original  Memoir.  He 
found  the  inscription  in  the  township  of  Kent.  On  the  west 
side  of  the  Housatonic  river,  about  a  mile  from  the  southwest 
corner  of  the  township,  was  an  Indian  settlement  called  Scati- 
cook.  Across  from  it,  about  a  hundred  rods  east  of  the  river, 
is  Cobble  Hill,  upon  whose  summit  stands  a  rock  of  "white 
flint,"  twelve  to  fourteen  feet  long,  eight  to  ten  feet  wide,  and 
five  to  six  feet  high,  "charged  with  antique  and  unknown  char- 
acters" on  all  sides,  but  not  on  the  top.  The  engraving  was 
done,  apparently,  with  an  iron  tool  by  pecking,  and  impressed 
him  as  being  very  old.  Much  of  it  seemed  very  faint  and 
doubtful  at  first,  but  after  more  close  attention  and  more  dili- 
gent scrutiny  he  concluded,  as  he  remarks,  that  "the  more  it  is 
studied,  the  more  writing  appears  to  satisfaction."  The  lines 
varied  from  one-fourth  inch  to  an  inch  in  breadth,  and  from 
one  to  two  tenths  of  an  inch  in  depth.  He  copied  some  of  the 
characters,  "such  only  as  were  obvious,  certain  and  indubi- 
table," in  the  following  manner :  "I  laid  the  sheet  of  paper  on 
the  Rock  &  with  my  finger  &  the  inverted  end  of  a  pencil, 
depressed  it  into  the  Lacunae  or  Excavations,  rubbing  it  hard, 
so  as  to  make  the  impression  of  the  figure  at  its  full  bigness, 
&  in  its  real  shape:  then  with  a  pencil  I  traced  the  edges  of 
the  lines,  while  the  paper  was  yet  lying  upon  the  character." 
One  example  of  the  drawings  so  produced  is  exhibited  in 
Figure  94.  It  was  hastily  copied,  free-hand,  from  the  original, 
and  hence  lacks  entire  accuracy,  yet  nevertheless  conveys  a  suf- 
ficiently correct  impression  of  the  general  appearance. 

Besides  such  irregular  lines  as  are  shown  in  our  illustra- 
tion. Stiles  found  and  reproduced  only  two  cases  of  "solitary 
and  disconnected  characters,"  resembling  the  letters  EI  in  one 
case,  and  BH  in  the  other.  Concerning  these  he  had  "some 
apprehensions,"  as  he  puts  it,  that  they  might  be  modern,  and 


262 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


especially  that  the  BH  might  be  the  initials  of  a  Barnabas 
Hatch  who  settled  in  1741  within  a  hundred  rods  of  the  rock. 


Figure  94 — Inscriptions  on  a  Rock  near  Scaticook,  in  Kent,  Conn.,  after 
Drawings  by  Ezra   Stiles,  October  7,   1789. 

"The  rest  however  is  not  of  English  Fabrick,  but  a  sculpture  I 
believe  of  very  high  &  remote  antiquity."  Although  the 
contemporary  Indians,  as  is  usual  when  such  things  are  under 


MISCELLANEOUS  INSCRIBED  ROCKS        263 

investigation,  "knew  nothing  of  the  matter,"  yet  there  had 
been  an  "immemorial  settlement"  of  them  in  the  vicinity. 
Moravian  missionaries  had  lived  at  Scaticook  from  1750  to 
1770,  The  first  known  report  of  the  existence  of  the  rock  as 
a  charactered  stone  seems  to  have  occurred  about  1760,  when 
"an  old  woman  shewed  to  a  selected  few  a  paper  giving  an 
account  that  at  a  Rock  with  writing  on  it  near  this  place,  they 
should  find  Mony  buried;"  in  consequence  of  which  they  spent 
several  years  in  digging  for  the  treasure,  but  "secreted  the 
matter  first  for  gain  &  since  for  shame." 

Dr.  Stiles  believed  that  the  manner  of  inscription  was  very 
like  that  of  Dighton  Rock,  and  had  the  same  Phoenician  origin. 
Kendall,  however,  regarded  it  as  an  Indian  inscription  consist- 
ing "but  of  a  very  few  and  trifling  sculptures."  Examination 
of  the  nine  pages  of  drawings  in  the  Memoir  and  of  an  ac- 
companying loose  sheet  of  the  original  drawing  in  full  size 
confirms  Kendall's  impression.  Aside  from  the  initials,  in 
whose  case  Stiles's  apprehensions  of  a  relatively  modern  origin 
were  doubtless  justified,  there  is  nothing  other  than  irregular 
haphazard  lines,  with  no  suggestion  that  they  were  meant  to 
form  definite  designs  of  any  kind.  If  they  are  truly  an  in- 
scription, and  not  an  accidental  natural  formation,  it  would 
seem  that  they  are  merely  an  example  of  meaningless  scribbling 
by  local  Indians. 

Filed  with  these  papers  by  Stiles  in  the  American  Academy 
is  a  sheet  of  drawings  which  evidently  represent  another  at- 
tempt, a  year  later,  to  copy  the  same  characters.  It  is  entitled : 
"Inscription  or  Characters  on  a  Rock  in  Kent  taken  off  A  D 
1790  By  Barzillai  Slosson."  Five  figures  are  presented,  having, 
like  the  sample  which  we  have  reproduced  from  Stiles,  no  re- 
semblance whatever  to  alphabetical  characters  or  representa- 
tions of  objects.  Slosson's  depiction,  in  fact,  suggests  nothing 
more  than  irregular  natural  cracks,  veins  and  weatherings  of 
the  stone.  It  is  quite  as  likely,  nevertheless,  that  Stiles  was 
right  in  describing  them  as  artificial  peckings. 

The  place  which  Stiles  called  Cobble  Hill  is  not  now  known 
by  that  name.  In  fact,  on  the  New  Milford  Quadrangle  sheet 
of  the  U.  S.  Geological  Survey  of  Connecticut,  it  has  no  name 


264  DIGHTON  ROCK 

attached  to  it.  The  map  shows  it  near  the  village  of  Kent,  east 
of  the  river  at  the  mouth  of  Thayer  Brook,  west  of  Leonard 
Pond,  and  next  north  of  Spooner  Hill,  of  which  it  is  now  con- 
sidered a  part.  The  tradition  of  a  rock  inscribed  with  mys- 
terious characters  still  survives  in  Kent.  It  is  now  known  as 
the  Molly  Fisher  rock.  It  is  in  the  woods,  a  little  south  of  the 
summit  of  the  hill.  I  examined  it  on  July  9,  1927,  and  could 
detect  nothing  that  resembled  artificial  markings  on  its  rough 
sides.  Nevertheless,  some  of  the  present  inhabitants  of  Kent 
are  firmly  convinced  that  it  bears  a  genuine  inscription  in  un- 
readable characters.  One  of  them  told  me  that  the  writing  is 
practically  identical  with  that  on  a  rock  at  Groton — the  first 
and  only  suggestion  I  have  met  with  that  there  is  an  inscribed 
rock  at  the  latter  place.  He  told  me  also  that  someone  once 
marked  the  inscription  on  this  Kent  rock  with  chalk  and  took 
a  photograph  of  it,  but  he  does  not  know  where  a  copy  of  it 
can  be  found.  It  is  said  that  a  Mr.  Spooner  wrote  a  description 
of  the  rock  some  years  ago,  and  published  it  in  a  local  paper. 

Six  miles  east  of  this  rock,  on  the  Pinnacle  two  miles  north 
of  New  Preston,  also  in  Kent  (but  now  in  Washington),  Stiles 
found  another  rock  on  which  four  Hebrew  words  were  en- 
graved. After  discussing  various  theories,  he  concludes  that 
the  carving  was  done  by  Jewish  searchers  after  mines,  since 
1760. 

8.  Connecticut  Valley,  Vermont. — In  his  History  of  Ver- 
mont, first  published  in  1794,  Samuel  Williams  described  In- 
dian sculptures  on  rocks  at  two  places  in  Vermont.  Kendall 
observed  them  in  1808,  and  discussed  them  in  his  Travels.  At 
the  Great  Falls  of  the  Connecticut  at  Bellows  Falls,  on  the  west 
side  of  the  river,  is  one  collection  of  them,  consisting  of  ten  or 
twelve  heads,  human  and  animal.  They  are  awkward  and  ill 
executed,  scattered  over  the  face  of  the  rock  in  the  most  even 
and  eligible  places,  not  forming  a  connected  work.  "How  long 
they  have  been  there,"  says  Williams,  "or  what  transactions 
they  were  intended  to  represent,  no  tradition  gives  us  any  ac- 
count." In  Kendall's  opinion,  they  speak  only  of  idle  hours  at 
a  fishing  resort. 


MISCELLANEOUS  INSCRIBED  ROCKS        265 

On  West  River  near  Brattleboro,  a  little  above  its  mouth, 
Kendall  found  "the  most  insignificant  of  all  the  Indian  sculp- 
tures that  I  had  met  with.  They  comprise  only  five  figures,  of 
a  diminutive  size,  scratched  rather  than  sculptured  on  the  sur- 
face of  a  small  mass  of  shistic  rock.  Four  represent  birds,  and 
one  is  either  that  of  a  dog  or  of  a  wolf."  They  are  an  example 
"of  the  disposition  of  the  Indians  to  sculpture  rocks,  and  to 
sculpture  them  even  for  amusement."  The  place  was  a  resort 
of  wild  ducks. 

A  detailed  description  of  these  stones  is  given  in  the  History 
of  Eastern  Vermont,  by  Benjamin  H.  Hall,  in  1858.  His  il- 
lustrations permit  a  good  idea  of  the  appearance  of  the  rocks 
and  their  Indian  glyphs.  At  Bellows  Falls  there  are  two  rocks, 
one  with  sixteen  human  heads,  the  other  with  only  one.  The 
rocks  are  at  the  foot  of  the  Falls,  eight  rods  south  of  the  bridge, 
and  are  much  of  the  time  under  water.  The  largest  one 
measures  six  feet  in  height  by  fifteen  in  width.  W.  H.  Crock- 
ett, in  his  History  of  Vermont  in  1921,  says  that  the  figures  are 
now  almost  entirely  obliterated.  Searching  for  them  unsuc- 
cessfully in  1927,  I  came  to  the  conclusion  that  the  rocks  are 
now  probably  entirely  covered  over  with  filling  or  destroyed,  as 
a  consequence  of  the  recent  extensive  industrial  developments 
that  have  been  made  at  their  site. 

The  "Indian  Rock"  at  West  or  Wantastiquet  River,  like- 
wise, is  now  concealed  from  observation,  being  entirely  covered 
by  water  on  account  of  the  recent  construction  of  a  dam  in  the 
Connecticut  River.  Its  location,  on  the  south  bank  of  West 
River  just  above  the  new  highway  bridge,  is  well  shown  in  an 
illustration  opposite  page  4  in  the  first  volume  of  Mary  R. 
Cabot's  Annals  of  Brattleboro,  1921.  Hall  speaks  of  this  rock 
as  being  ten  feet  wide  and  eight  feet  high,  and  situated  a  hun- 
dred rods  west  of  the  junction  of  West  River  with  the  Con- 
necticut. The  date  "1755"  can  be  distinguished  on  it.  He 
finds  it  decorated  with  ten  figures,  instead  of  the  five  seen  by 
Kendall,  including  two  additional  birds,  two  resembling  snakes, 
and  one  uncertain.  He  believes  that  they  were  carved  by  In- 
dians for  amusement. 

Schoolcraft  is  another  authority  who  has  pictured  and  dis- 


266 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


cussed  these  records.*     It  was  his  belief  that  at  West  River 
the  family  clan  of  the  Eagle  had  recorded  its  location,  and  that 
the  pictographs  at  Bellows  Falls  represented  a  battle  scene.   His 
illustrations  were  based  upon  drawings  by  A.  C.  Hamlin. 
There  are  photographs  of  these  pictographs  in  the  Gilbert 


Fig.  95 


Localltj  of  the  ScuIptnrWL 

Fig.  96 


lodisii  Senlptveii 

Fig.  97 


iniitu  Benlptar*. 

Fig.  98 


Figures  95-98 — Inscription   Rocks   in   Vermont  as   Pictured   by   Benj.   H. 

Hall,   1858. 


Museum  at  Amherst  College.  In  our  own  Plates  we  present  a 
representative  selection  of  illustrations  from  Hall  (Figures 
95  to  98),  from  Schoolcraft  (Figure  99),  and  from  the  Gil- 
bert Museum  (Figure  100). 

*  Indian  Tribes,  1860,  vi.  607. 


Fig.  99.     Drawing  by  A.  C.  Hamlin,  1860,  of  inscriptions 
at    Bellows   Falls 


Fig.  100.    Inscriptions  at  Bellows  Falls,  from  a  photograph  in  the 
Catalogue  of  the  Gilbert   Museum.  Amherst   College 

Faciiuj  /'(/(/('  266 


MISCELLANEOUS  INSCRIBED  ROCKS       267 

9.  Tree  at  Weathersfield,  Vermont.— Kendall  found  con- 
firmation for  his  belief  that  Dighton  Rock  and  the  two  Con- 
necticut Valley  sites  in  Vermont  were  sculptured  by  Indians  in 
a  design  known  to  have  been  cut  by  Indians  on  the  four  sides 
of  the  trunk  of  a  pine  tree  at  Weathersfield.  He  could  make 
out  only  two  figures,  one  of  a  woman  much  like  the  large  bust 
pictured  on  Dighton  Rock,  and  one  of  a  child.  Something 
perhaps  also  human  figures,  had  been  on  the  other  two  sides' 
but  had  become  illegible.  The  carving  is  known  to  have  been 
done  by  an  Indian  party  that  raided  Deerfield  in  1704. 

Hall  criticizes  Kendall's  account  of  this  tree.  Finding  that 
in  his  day  fifty  years  after  Kendall,  "the  oldest  inhabitants  of 
Weathersfield  have  never  known  of  its  existence,"  he  believes 
that  there  never  was  anything  of  the  sort.  But  Kendall  was 
a  careful  observer,  and  his  description  as  an  eye-witness  is  too 
circumstantial  to  permit  any  serious  doubt  as  to  its  truth 

.•  ^^^''^?oL'u  ^'"^  Hampshire.-Jeremy  Belknap  men- 
tioned in  1813'*  a  piece  of  bone,  on  which  is  engraven  the  bust 
of  a  man,  apparently  in  the  agonies  of  death;"  and  two  pic- 
tured pine  trees.  One  of  the  latter,  on  the  shore  of  Winipiseogee 
River,  depicted  a  canoe  with  two  men  in  it,  and  was  supposed 
to  be  a  mark  of  direction.  On  the  other,  in  Moulton- 
borough,  by  a  carrying  place  between  two  ponds,  was  carved 
the  history  of  some  expedition,  with  the  number  of  killed  and 
prisoners.  On  account  of  their  perishable  character,  these  en- 
gravings cannot  have  been  of  any  considerable  age. 

11.  Picture  Rocks  about  Machias  Bay  in  Maine.— In  his 
monograph  on  the  Picture  Writing  of  the  American  Indians, 
Mallery  says  that  a  number  of  inscribed  rocks  have  been  found 
in  Maine,  and  that  information  of  others  has  been  obtained. 
He  mentions  specifically,  however,  only  those  at  Clark's  Point 
Birch  Point,  and  Hog  Island,  about  Machias  Bay,  and  describes 
only  those  at  Clark's  Point.  His  drawing  of  these  is  from  a 
sketch  made  by  H.  R.  Taylor  of  Machias  in  1868,  and  is  shown 
in  Figure  101.  The  following  account  is  condensed  from  his 
description : 

^History  of  New  Hampshire,  iii.  65. 


268 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


^ 
^ 


* 


H 


iJ 


2 
2 


O 


be 


MISCELLANEOUS  INSCRIBED  ROCKS        269 

The  rock  or  ledge  is  about  fifty  feet  long  and  fifteen  feet  in 
width,  nearly  horizontal  for  most  of  its  length,  thence  sloping 
gently  to  low-water  mark.  Many  figures  have  been  effaced  by 
natural  erosion  and  by  visitors.  The  carving  was  made  by  blows 
of  a  pointed  instrument  of  hard  stone  and  gives  evidence  of  much 
patient  labor.  The  deepest  incisions  are  now  [1888]  about  three- 
eighths  of  an  inch.  There  is  no  extrinsic  evidence  of  their  age. 
The  place  was  known  to  traders  early  in  the  seventeenth  century, 
and  much  earlier  was  visited  by  Basque  fishermen,  and  perhaps 
by  the  unfortunate  Cortereals.  The  local  Indians,  a  tribal  branch 
of  the  Abnaki,  said  of  the  sculptures  that  "all  their  old  men  knew 
of  them,"  perhaps  by  traditions  handed  down  through  many  gener- 
ations. Mr.  Taylor  obtained  from  Peter  Benoit,  an  aged  resident 
Indian,  the  following  suggestions  concerning  interpretation:  the 
figures  must  not  all  be  read  from  one  side  only;  one  near  the 
centre  is  a  squaw  with  sea-fowl  on  her  head,  denoting  "that  squaw 
had  smashed  canoe,  saved  beaver-skin,  walked  one-half  moon  all 
alone  toward  east,  just  same  as  heron  wading  along  shore;"  the 
three  lines  below  her,  resembling  a  trident,  represent  the  three 
branches  of  Machias  river ;  the  feathery  mark  to  the  right  of  this 
is  a  fissure  in  the  rock.  Mallery  concludes  that  all  these  petro- 
glyphs  were  without  doubt  of  Abnaki  origin,  either  of  the  Penob- 
scot or  of  the  Passamaquoddy  division.  The  rocks  lay  on  the 
common  line  of  water  communication  between  those  divisions  and 
were  convenient  as  halting  places. 

The  Narrative  of  the  Town  of  Machias,  by  George  W, 
Drisko,  published  in  1904,  mentions  that  traces  of  Indian 
hieroglyphics  were  visible  forty  years  ago,  and  are  not  alto- 
gether obliterated  now.  At  the  time  of  the  first  white  settlers, 
he  continues,  and  long  before,  Machias  river  was  a  place  of 
rendezvous  every  September  for  Indians  from  St.  John  to  the 
Penobscot.  The  Centennial  History  of  Machias,  1863,  speaks 
of  the  carvings  as  a  "picture-map;"  and  H.  D.  Williamson,  in 
his  History  of  Maine,  1832,  says  that  the  Plymouth  colonists 
established  a  trading  house  at  Machias  in  1633. 

In  our  discussions  of  Dighton  Rock,  we  have  learned  to  be 
cautious  about  accepting  interpretations  by  Indians  of  the  petro- 
glyphic  records  of  their  own  ancestors.  If  one  knows  already 
from  other  sources  a  story  that  has  been  thus  depicted,  he  can 


270  DIGHTON  ROCK 

see  the  appropriateness  of  the  illustrations  and  perhaps  be  aided 
also  in  recalling  the  details.  But  otherwise,  as  Henshaw  points 
out,  an  Indian's  guess  is  no  better  than  that  of  a  well-informed 
white  man,  and  many  alternative  guesses  can  equally  well  be 
made.  Consequently,  we  can  give  very  little  weight  to  Peter 
Benoit's  few  suggestions.  It  may  be  that  some  small  parts  of 
these  inscriptions  refer  to  agreements  or  treaties  concerning 
trade  or  hunting-grounds,  but  no  one  now,  Indian  or  white, 
could  possibly  be  sure  of  this.  Many  of  the  designs  are  almost 
surely  the  same  kind  of  things  that  we  have  found  on  the  rest 
of  our  rocks,  casual  pictures  of  men  and  animals — moose,  cari- 
bou, beaver — made  merely  for  amusement.  Some  look  as  if 
they  might  have  been  intended  to  commemorate  an  interesting 
incident,  now  wholly  unrecoverable,  in  some  individual's  ex- 
perience. The  most  striking  difference  between  these  and  our 
other  petroglyphs  consists  in  the  fact  that  these  seem  to  portray 
animals  and  men  almost  exclusively,  and  to  lack  the  many  hap- 
hazard and  meaningless  lines  so  prominent  on  the  rocks  else- 
where. These  are  predominantly  pictures ;  the  others  predomi- 
nantly mere  scribblings.  The  latter,  we  saw,  were  probably 
made  after  the  arrival  of  white  men  and  were  inspired  by  their 
example.  So  far  as  known  facts  are  concerned,  the  same  may 
be  true  of  these  near  Machias ;  and  the  early  existence  of  a 
trading  post  there  suggests  it  as  a  strong  probability. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

FRAUDS,  RUMORS  AND  MISTAKEN  REPORTS 

Our  list  of  genuine  or  probable  localities  of  inscriptions  in 
New  England  has  now  grown  to  approximately  twenty.  Fully 
as  many  more  have  been  reported  from  time  to  time,  which  we 
shall  have  to  regard  as  cases  of  unfounded  rumor,  of  error  due 
to  mistaking  natural  marks  for  human  records,  or  of  fraud. 
Some  of  them  are  well  known  and  have  been  seriously  accepted, 
so  that  it  is  important  to  establish  the  truth  about  them. 
Examination  of  them  all  is  instructive  as  showing  how 
easily  rumor  may  mislead,  how  difficult  it  often  is  to 
distinguish  between  accidental  collocations  of  lines  and 
products  of  human  design,  and  the  extent  to  which  wide  celeb- 
rity as  ancient  records  may  be  attained  by  rocks  and  tablets 
without  sufficient  warrant.  In  any  field  of  inquiry,  knowledge 
is  not  complete  until  not  only  the  true  details,  but  also  the  false 
appearances  that  simulate  fact,  are  understood;  and  to  a  psy- 
chologist the  latter  have  a  positive  and  fascinating  interest  of 
their  own.  We  turn,  therefore,  to  the  New  England  instances 
of  this  kind. 

1.  In  Wampanoag  and  Narragansett  Territory. — School- 
craft believed  that  the  Pokanokets,  or  Wampanoags,  had  es- 
tablished themselves  in  their  ultimate  territory  after  conquering 
tribes  already  in  possession.  "Evidences  of  their  ancient  tri- 
umphs have,  it  is  believed,  been  found  in  the  rude  and  simple 
pictographs  of  the  country.  These  simple  historical  memorials 
were  more  common  among  the  hills  and  valleys  of  the  country, 
when  it  was  first  occupied,  than  they  are  at  the  present  day."^ 
This  seems  to  have  been  all  pure  fancy  on  Schoolcraft's  part. 
The  few  inscriptions  credibly  reported  as  having  disappeared, 
— a  few  at  Tiverton  and  one  at  Gardner's  Point, — would  not 

^Indian  Tribes,  vi.  113. 

271 


272  DIGHTON  ROCK 

warrant  such  a  statement.  His  belief  was  founded,  apparently, 
on  accepting  as  valid  such  rumors  as  we  are  about  to  examine 
and  reject. 

In  another  connection"  he  asserts  that  "Mr.  B.  Perley 
Poore,  the  historical  agent  of  Massachusetts,  found  Indian 
pictographs,  of  an  early  date,  represented  in  the  Marine  De- 
partment of  France."  This  might  easily  be  interpreted  as  evi- 
dence of  early  and  spontaneous  pictography  in  New  England; 
but  it  has  no  such  implication.  Mr.  Poore's  valuable  transcripts 
from  the  French  archives,  although  intended  as  contributions 
to  the  history  of  New  England,  include  much  material  that  has 
no  direct  bearing  upon  that  subject.  They  are  contained  in 
ten  volumes,  which  were  deposited  in  the  Archives  of  the  Com- 
monwealth of  Massachusetts  on  January  1,  1849.  The  list  of 
illustrations  in  the  first  volume  refers  to  an  "Indian  hiero- 
glyphic Picture  Book,"  and  the  catalogue  of  contents  mentions 
the  same  as  a  "Manuscript  in  Indian  Hieroglyphics;"  and  it  is 
clear  that  there  is  no  other  representation  of  pictographs  in  the 
ten  volumes.  These  are  on  pages  5  to  8  of  Volume  III,  and  are 
"Fac-similes  of  the  108th,  9th,  10th  and  11th  pages  of  the 
'Livre  des  Sauvages,'  "  which  seems  to  have  been  written  about 
1680.  There  is  nowhere  any  statement  as  to  the  locality  of  its 
origin.  But  the  pictographs  themselves  exhibit  abundant  and 
unquestionable  evidence  of  white  influence,  and  the  character  of 
the  whole  series  of  documents  transcribed  by  Poore  makes  it 
certain  that  the  "Livre  des  Sauvages"  was  found  somewhere  in 
French  Canada,  and  not  in  New  England. 

We  have  already  investigated  a  rumor  that  there  was  an 
inscribed  rock  at  Sachuest  Point,  and  discovered  it  to  be,  in  its 
original  form,  probably  a  case  of  assigning  to  a  wrong  locality 
the  accidentally  made  grooves  at  Purgatory.  Another  rock  at 
Sachuest,  studied  for  a  while  as  a  possible  petroglyph,  was 
found  to  have  on  it  only  plough-marks.  A  stone  from  Tiverton 
bearing  mysterious  marks,  and  another  from  "King  Philip's 
Path"  in  Duxbury,  have  been  submitted  to  me  for  inspection, 
on  which  I  find  nothing  that  cannot  be  explained  in  a  similar 
manner.     Dr.  Webb  once  expressed  his  opinion  that  the  Writ- 

2/fetW.,  vi.  605n. 


FRAUDS,  RUMORS  AND  REPORTS  273 

ing  Rocks  in  Tiverton,  of  which  he  had  heard  but  which  he 
had  not  yet  found,  were  situated  near  Rowland's  Ferry,  and 
had  been  used  in  the  construction  of  the  Stone  Bridge  there; 
but  this  was  a  mislocation  of  the  rocks  actually  near  High  Hill. 
A  friend  has  told  me  of  having  seen  marked  rocks  at  still  an- 
other place  in  Tiverton;  but  I  discover  nothing  to  confirm  it. 
Another  has  described  strange  "Northmen's  writings"  which 
he  and  his  companions  used  to  see  on  rocks  on  Windmill  Hill 
in  Warren  when  he  was  a  boy,  some  of  which  have  since  then 
been  blasted  away.  There  are  unquestionably  numerous  human 
records  there.  They  seem  to  consist,  however,  only  of  initials, 
names,  and  dates.  The  earliest  date  that  I  saw  was  1875 ;  but 
one  of  1889  looked  very  old  and  worn,  giving  a  new  illustra- 
tion of  how,  on  such  rocks,  relatively  recent  inscriptions  may 
sometimes  fade  into  an  appearance  of  great  antiquity.  There 
are  older  names  and  initials  than  these  dated  ones,  and  these 
are  all  illegible.  They  were  doubtless  more  numerous  on  the 
parts  of  the  ledge  that  have  now  been  removed,  and  it  is  not 
improbable  that  many  of  them  dated  from  revolutionary  days. 
A  regiment  under  Col.  Israel  Angell  encamped  here  for  several 
months  in  1778,  and  two  years  later  a  detachment  of  French 
troops  occupied  the  same  camping  grounds.  Miss  Virginia 
Baker  says  that  "a  little  more  than  half  a  century  ago  a  post 
driven  into  the  ground  indicated  the  spot  where  Lafayette's 
marquee  stood,  just  southeast  of  the  ledge  of  rocks  on  the 
summit  of  the  hill."^  These  soldiers  may  well  have  been  the 
first  to  make  records  here,  and  the  illegible  remnants  of  their 
work  may  have  accounted  for  the  later  belief  in  Northmen's 
writings.  It  is  likely,  however,  that  certain  curious  natural 
formations  contributed  to  the  same  impression.  Some  hard 
veins,  for  example,  stand  out  on  the  rock  in  shapes  very  like 
letters  and  pictures,  and  further  mysterious  resemblances  to 
them  can  be  seen  in  other  natural  features  of  the  surface. 

A  correspondent  asked  me  to  investigate  a  rumor  that  there 
was  an  inscription  on  the  Maker  Farm  near  Bushee's  Corner  in 
Swansea.  I  found  a  ledge  with  "Devil's  Footprints"  of  natural 
origin,  a  cave  once  inhabited  by  an  Indian  woman  named 

^History  of  Warren  in  the  War  of  the  Revolution,  1901,  pp.  25,  31. 


274  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Marget,  and  a  story  of  a  rock,  now  lost,  which  almost  cer- 
tainly had  on  it  only  natural  veins  and  similar  marks.  Another 
correspondent  wrote  to  me  that  he  had  heard  of  an  inscribed 
rock  in  Middleboro,  on  the  Taunton  River.  This  rumor  may 
well  have  been  founded  upon  the  following  statement  by  Henry 
E.  Chase:  'Tn  Indian  burying  ground  in  Assawamset  Neck,  in 
Lakeville,  near  Middleboro',  is  a  gravestone  with  a  peculiar  in- 
scription of  two  letters  or  characters."  The  stone  seems  now 
to  have  disappeared,  although  there  are  other  Indian  grave- 
stones still  there,  and  I  find  no  one  who  recalls  what  the  strange 
characters  looked  like. 

Still  another  rumor  that  came  to  me  was  that  of  a  "marked 
or  inscribed  rock"  on  the  farm  of  Stephen  O.  Metcalf  in 
Exeter.  This  turned  out  to  be  a  very  modern  tribute  "To  the 
Memory  of  Wawaloam,  Wife  of  Miantinomi,  1661,"  fully 
described  by  Sidney  S.  Rider  in  his  Lands  of  Rhode  Island. 
The  Providence  Sunday  Journal  for  October  21,  1923,  tells  of 
a  head-and-shoulder  outline  of  a  man,  hewn  into  a  boulder  on 
the  old  William  Slocum  Farm  in  South  Kingstown,  long  be- 
lieved by  neighbors  to  be  a  relic  of  the  "Stone  Age,"  but  ac- 
tually carved  by  a  very  small  boy  fifty  years  ago. 

Not  far  from  the  Coast  Guard  station  near  the  southwest 
corner  of  Block  Island  there  is  a  "chiseled  rock,"  which  Mr. 
George  R.  Burgess  has  described  to  me  as  bearing  artificial 
lines  resembling  the  letters  LM.  Nothing  more  than  this  fact 
seems  to  be  known  about  it.  In  S.  T.  Livermore's  History  of 
Block  Island,  1877,  on  page  197,  is  a  description  of  a  pestle 
found  on  the  island  about  1860:  "On  it  are  still  remaining  In- 
dian characters,  made,  it  seems,  by  some  thickened  juice  or  sap, 
of  dark  brown,  and  of  such  a  nature  as  to  whiten  the  stone 
beneath  the  ink,  or  juice,  so  that  when  the  latter  has  worn 
away  and  disappeared  the  hieroglyphic  beneath  still  remains. 
Two  characters  are  well  defined ;  the  one  representing  a  stalk  of 
corn  half  grown,  and  the  other  resembling  a  full  grown  stalk." 
This  stone,  probably  only  a  naturally  shaped  pebble,  is  now  in 
the  Museum  of  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Society.  The 
drawings  are  apparently  in  ink,  one  of  them  still  fresh  and 
clear,  a  well  made  picture  of  a  stalk  of  corn.    I  agree  with  the 


FRAUDS,  RUMORS  AND  REPORTS  275 

judgment  of  Mr.  Chapin,  secretary  of  the  Society,  that  it  is  not 
aboriginal  work,  but  was  executed  by  a  white  artist,  very  Hkely 
in  the  19th  century. 

There  is  one  stone  in  this  region  which  has  been  described 
to  me  recently,  about  which  I  do  not  yet  feel  free  to  speak  fully. 
It  is  said  to  bear  characters  in  genuine  runic  letters,  recording 
a  name  and  date  which,  if  authentic,  would  settle  finally  the 
question  as  to  whether  the  Norsemen  of  the  Eleventh  Century 
ever  voyaged  as  far  south  as  this.  The  stone  has  not  yet  been 
examined  by  persons  qualified  to  determine  the  approximate  age 
of  its  inscribed  letters.  It  is  not  likely,  however,  that  it  can  ever 
serve  as  decisive  evidence  of  Norse  visits.  If  it  can  be  estab- 
lished that  the  characters  are  of  relatively  recent  origin,  then 
we  may  conclude  that  someone  made  them  either  as  a  deliberate 
deception,  or  in  response  to  a  playful  impulse  to  act  out  the 
story  of  the  Norse  voyages,  with  himself  as  hero.  Even  grown 
men,  as  well  as  children,  sometimes  delight  in  such  games.  But, 
on  the  other  hand,  if  their  recent  origin  cannot  be  conclusively 
proven,  there  is  no  probability  that  a  genuine  antiquity  of  900 
years  can  be  proven  for  them,  either.  Far  from  testifying  un- 
mistakably to  visits  here  by  the  Northmen,  therefore,  those  who 
believe  that  Labrador,  or  Newfoundland,  or  Nova  Scotia  mark 
the  southernmost  limit  of  their  penetration  can  always  justify 
themselves  in  the  conviction  that  the  markings  on  this  stone 
must  be  of  fairly  recent  date. 

The  most  interesting  case  from  this  region,  unfortunately, 
it  seems  necessary  to  regard  as  deliberately  fraudulent.  An 
elaborately  inscribed  stone,  called  the  Hammond  Tablet  by 
those  who  know  of  it,  measuring  about  6^  by  9]^  inches,  is 
claimed  by  a  resident  of  Taunton  to  have  been  found  by  him  in 
1917  buried  a  few  inches  deep  in  the  soil  on  the  bank  of  the 
Three  Mile  River  at  Westville,  two  miles  from  the  centre  of 
Taunton.  It  has  been  described  by  Ralph  Davol  in  the  Boston 
Sunday  Post  for  June  26,  1921.  It  is  crowded  on  both  sides 
with  pictographs  skilfully  executed  in  the  Indian  manner  or  in 
evidently  designed  imitation  of  it.  Except  for  a  much  larger 
number  of  them  in  this  case,  they  closely  duplicate  the  pictured 
symbols   on  another  tablet    found   fifty  years  ago  in  Bucks 


276 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


Figure   102— The  "Mammoth"    Side  of   the   Hammond   Tablet. 


FRAUDS,  RUMORS  AND  REPORTS  277 


Figure  103— The  "Historical"  Side  of  the  Hammond  Tablet. 


278  DIGHTON  ROCK 

County,  Pennsylvania.^  On  one  side  of  each  stone  is  depicted 
a  scene  of  combat  between  Indians  aided  by  the  Heavenly 
Powers,  near  their  wigwams  on  the  edge  of  a  forest,  and  the 
great  hairy  American  mammoth.  On  the  other  side  are  nu- 
merous designs  that  undoubtedly  symbolize  scenes  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  migrations  of  the  Lenni  Lenape,  or  Delaware  In- 
dians, as  that  is  related  in  their  historical  song,  the  Walam 
Olum.  Archaeologists  have  never  been  willing  to  acknowledge 
the  authenticity  of  the  engravings  on  the  earlier  tablet  as  genu- 
ine Indian  records  of  ancient  date  or  faithfully  copied  by  In- 
dians from  an  ancient  original.  In  case  of  this  later  tablet  we 
must  accept  as  authoritative  the  opinion  of  C.  C.  Willoughby, 
director  of  the  Peabody  Museum  of  Harvard  University,  who 
has  examined  it  and  who  writes  to  me  about  it  as  follows : 

The  surface  of  the  tablet  does  not  seem  to  be  very  old.  The 
shape  of  the  tablet  itself  is  different  from  any  example  of  pre- 
historic art  that  I  have  seen.  It  resembles  the  spread  skin  of  an 
animal.  A  few  of  the  designs  on  the  tablet,  notably  the  three 
figures  of  birds  and  quadrupeds  at  the  top  of  the  side  not  showing 
the  mammoths,  bear  a  very  close  resemblance  to  Indian  picto- 
graphs.  Most  of  the  other  designs,  however,  have  little  in  com- 
mon with  old  Indian  work.  The  upper  mammoth  is  drawn  in 
perspective,  a  method  of  delineation  unknown  to  Indians  un- 
familiar with  drawings  of  Europeans.  A  comparison  of  this  pic- 
ture with  the  similar  scene  upon  the  so-called  Lenape  stone  shows 
conclusively  either  that  one  of  the  pictures  was  copied  from  the 
other  or  that  both  were  made  by  the  same  man.  I  am  inclined  to 
the  latter  opinion,  that  both  are  the  work  of  a  clever  maker  of 
fraudulent  "antiquities."  [In  the  collection  of  which  the  tablet 
forms  a  part]  there  are  thirty  or  more  objects  which  I  am  sure 
arc  fraudulent.  The  owner  claims  that  most  of  them  were  found 
by  him  in  Taunton  and  vicinity.  If  so,  they  must  have  been 
"planted"  for  his  benefit.  The  tablet  undoubtedly  belongs  with 
this  group.  I  doubt  if  these  fraudulent  specimens  are  of  very 
recent  origin.  They  may  have  been  made  several  years  ago,  and 
it  is  possible  that  the  "Lenape"  stone  formed  originally  a  part  of 
the  same  lot. 

*  H.  C.  Mercer,  The  Lenape  Stone,  or  The  Indian  and  the  Mammoth. 
Putnam's,  1885. 


FRAUDS,  RUMORS  AND  REPORTS  279 

Even  if  fraudulent,  this  tablet  is  a  remarkable  production, 
and  of  sufficient  interest  to  deserve  a  permanent  record.  The 
photograph  of  Figure  106  shows  the  general  appearance  of  one 
side  of  it,  but  it  is  not  possible  to  see  in  it  very  clearly  the 
designs  engraved  upon  the  stone.  In  Figures  102  and  103, 
however,  are  presented  drawings  of  the  two  sides,  made  by 
first  taking  rubbings  direct  from  the  stone  and  then  marking 
on  these  all  lines  that  seemed  to  be  artificial  after  careful  com- 
parison of  the  rubbings  with  the  stone.  These  drawings  por- 
tray the  engravings  on  the  tablet  accurately  for  the  most  part, 
although  a  few  of  them  were  drawn  so  faintly  that  one  cannot 
be  entirely  certain  about  them, 

2.  Elsewhere  in  Massachusetts. — Except  about  Narragan- 
sett  Bay,  there  are  no  genuine  Indian  inscriptions  reported  from 
Massachusetts.  Two  rocks  gained  fame,  however,  as  posses- 
sing them.  The  first  of  these  was  in  Rutland,  and  was  appar- 
ently first  mentioned  in  Morse's  Universal  Geography  in  1805 
as  an  "Ethiopic  inscription."  Kendall  visited  it  and  found  it 
to  be  a  purely  natural  granite  stone  with  veins  of  schoerl.  Yet 
Webb,  in  his  letter  to  Rafn  in  1830,  indicates  that  it  is  still 
rumored  to  be  "a  line  of  considerable  length  in  unknown  char- 
acters ;"  and  only  later,  after  further  inquiry,  as  he  announced 
in  his  letter  of  1835,  did  he  discover  and  adopt  Kendall's  view 
of  it. 

In  1854,  G.  L.  Pool  described  and  pictured  in  the  New 
England  Historic  Genealogical  Register  an  inscription  on  a 
rock  in  West  Newbury,  in  the  Merrimack  valley  (Figure  104). 
It  was  referred  to  by  Whittier  in  his  "Double-headed  Snake  of 
Newbury"  as  a  "Northman's  Written  Rock,"  and  I  have  found 
no  further  discussion  as  to  its  authenticity.  But  we  can  now 
definitely  include  it  among  mistaken  reports.  It  was  investi- 
gated recently,  at  my  suggestion,  by  George  Francis  Dow, 
editor  of  Old-Time  New  England.  He  found  the  local  anti- 
quarian, William  Merrill,  an  elderly  man,  who  was  familiar 
with  the  story  and  who  took  him  to  the  ledge.  Mr.  Dow  writes 
to  me:  "To  our  great  disappointment  we  found  that  the  sup- 
posed markings  were  only  natural  cracks  in  the  rocks.  There 
isn't  a  sign  of  an  artificial  marking  on  the  surface.    Mr.  Mer- 


280  DIGHTON  ROCK 

rill  told  us  that  an  elderly  man,  a  Mr.  Follansbee,  had  told  him 
that  at  the  time  when  Mr.  Pool,  the  originator  of  the  report  of 
the  inscription,  visited  this  ledge  he  accompanied  him,  and  he 
said  to  Mr.  Merrill  that  Pool  at  the  time  was  much  intoxicated. 
He  recalled  that  Pool  showed  him  a  sketch  of  the  rock,  but 
nothing  was  said  at  the  time  of  the  appearance  or  discovery  of 
an  inscription.  So  the  legend  may  be  considered  as  disposed 
of." 

In  the  American  Monthly  Magazine  of  1836  there  is  men- 
tion of  a  stone  found  in  Sandwich,  Massachusetts,  in  1833, 
with  characters  thought  to  resemble  those  on  Dighton  Rock. 
The  reviewer  says,  however,  that  this  turned  out  to  be  the 
work  of  an  insane  man,  who  had  been  allowed  to  ramble  about 
in  the  woods,  and  who  cut  meaningless  figures  upon  rocks.  In 
his  second  manuscript  Itinerary,  Dr.  Stiles  entered  the  follow- 
ing note  on  June  7,  1768:  "At  Nantasket  at  South  Side  of 
South  Hill  is  a  Stone  charged  with  Characters.  Mr.  Loring 
of  Sudbury  Aet  86  tells  me  he  well  remembers  it."  Nothing 
further  has  ever  been  heard  of  it.  The  report  probably  had 
no  better  foundation  than  the  following  one,  which  Stiles  re- 
corded in  his  fourth  Itinerary  on  September  30,  1788:  "Rock 
1^  m  NW  from  Acushnet — Writing — near  Moses  Washburn 
— K  Philip."  What  the  connection  was  between  King  Philip 
and  the  Writing  Rock  he  does  not  state.  Mr.  Louis  W.  Tilden 
of  New  Bedford  has  kindly  investigated  this  reference  for  me. 
He  located  the  Moses  Washburn  farm  and  talked  with  Mr. 
Skiff,  its  present  occupant.  He  writes :  "Mr.  Skiff  is  about 
86  years  old  but  has  a  very  good  memory.  He  knows  of  no 
rocks  with  inscriptions  about  there,  but  does  recollect  a  huge 
boulder  called  'Devil's  Rock,'  which  bore  a  so-called  impression 
of  a  human  foot  and  a  groove  as  if  a  chain  had  been  dragged 
across  it.  This  rock  was  demolished  back  in  the  forties  to 
supply  stone  for  the  New  Bedford  City  Hall.  We  located  its 
position  about  ten  minutes  walk  from  the  house  and  found  a 
few  fragments  left.  It  was  of  hard  granite  formation  with  a 
vein  of  soft  slaty  stone  running  through  it.  I  think  this  freak 
of  nature  was  very  likely  what  your  memorandum  referred  to, 


■._  1^1 
"  '?%:^^, -2f  •  -'  -a. 

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«iay  •^loiii-. 

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■■<"■.,'•'•>'<■-'     I'.v     II..-     NoithmiHi'.H    uilii.-u 

«'hiltl.-i-«  lloiiii-  Uiill.i.N, 

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l..-ni,l.-l.-u, .,--.„ .l,-v.-,.n..-.-.,t.,n.«l.|, 

:j'l<!ifi..ii..   I.y   til.-  iinll\i-   l.',-.l  Men  i,t  :,   |;,|,.r 

II.;  loii.i.j  Ih-  \..rin-...-..  i.:.iii,-l,...  ^rsiv.- 

«  Illlill  III..    l.,-l„|.„-k-.    -I,;l,1.- 
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■Wl.illl.-i-.  (•.■,.,„-      \,„,.  ,.i„      ,  •• 


(0^ fined  ^o<A^fi, 


N1|M>.>-..1  nap  .>f  Xi.rijiitl..  tf!"  ILirlhT  Mii.l 
«ili-r..uiMhiiK>,  with  tin-  N.ii-.ij,.;ii-,  !„„im- 
wli.-rc  "th.-j  .Iwclt  loiiK  >'i'<l  iiictMl.<l  lli»- 
-  lip."  aii.l  til.-  kfi-1  or  .sl.-m  ..f  Tliorv  a!.r- 
-hli.  ii<  it  a|.|i.tin-<l  M-l  up  .111  (In-  Sf!i«.- 

••Tlii-u  r-uiil  TliorvHiil  to  Ill-<(•<>nlpan1<»l<- 
■■^■l»tt•  will  I,  that  Wf  r»l«>  up  lifrfa  kit-l  lui 
111.-   tH'-».  iiiul  rail  It  'Kt'oliu'w,'  itu.l  mi  llicy 

su|>p<>^.  .1  to  liiivo  iM-i-n  <lrawii  In-  a  .•krae- 
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Kirek  till-  ll.-.l  hi  tin-  M.-vt-ntb  CViiiiir». 

Kr.iiii  1111  ai.i-I.Mit  jn-.iv.-  ill  It.-\i-il\ .  M.ix. 


•ni(.«  vvii-  :.|l  , 


Tni<-iii«»  IViiiii  M  -I  iil|>iiin<.|  ,|.,n.-  lit    ll,,iir«- 

ll.-ail    f(:,>„|,t„„    N.ll.     ^„, I..  i.KuMli.- 

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.\<- -ti:ill  liiir.x  III.',  iiii.l  -.-I  .-r-.-.i-^al  in  |,."i.l 
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s,-.-— „:;;,. ,r  Kh-.-k  11.1-  l;.-,i.' 

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III  JiatI,  (  lm(ii|>l:iMi  r.MiD.l  .1  .-r..-,  hi  tin'  w.mwU 
WTyol.!  !iii.l  ii(...,\.  ' 


4L'J. 


M.i|.  u-  alMH.-  from  iii|iir<T>-iit  Miiii<l|..>iii|, 
Ini.  .-.1  .III  til.-  I.a-..-  itf  II  -.lotif  iiij,,..  f  ,■.„„  :,„ 
:.ii.-i.iil  arm.-  Ill  Iti^xTlv.  .ya-~.  •'iipi^.M-.l 
.r  •••  "f  =• '»<<i'  -iMl"-  l>m  tr««-.-.l  l.v  a  iiaiiVf 
l(.i|  .Mall.  ■  «---, 

Til.-  1!.  I  .l.iliii  lllcifhi^.i,  ,:,v.  thai  alxmt 
I'.^i,  «l.i-ii  iM-  laiii.-  ov.r   Willi    hi.  foIli.rl« 

.^T  ■'.'.'•    V"l    '.■'""   "'"""    '">  .\<"<f*ol   .IK,-. 
I.I  UK- iii-.i  ..rill-.  riMiii-iiilii-nii.-i-.  ihcr,.  wa.H 

a»l,I.,«    .v.,lii:,,|.-.,l|,..|    >.,„„«      X:„.h,M«     who 

''"'""■• "-•    Ihilyi-   lii.llait   l..«iiorwt(r. 

«:..„.  «M-  ..,1  >..ll..|li.  .l.|....f  v..  \.,H1,  riv.-r. 

■"■I'- 1:1.  Mii.l  -i.iith   -i.l,.   .,r   V,- riv.r  »-.» 

'■■_-  ;  ..  I  -,11,  .1  N,.„,„k.  1.." 

h.i    .,      ni„-l..M--   .1 lij.n.m   ..r  aii.-i.-.il 

^   I'l.  1"  i.::i.i-iii.  r..M,.ui„.j 

I  •    :    .     '..i.l   I    ..1    )i,i-    ,.,li-„,l..    «l.„„l   t|„. 

,'  " '     ';.'i-     ult.r.H.    l.-iiia  .(.-;„|,  1m. 

'  '.        "  ■•    .        >i".iil  a  mill- hill...-,  w>.  .ai.K- »« 

.11..'  i.^t.  I. Ill  -,.„t,.i  .>„  j|„.  I,,,,  „r  .,„  |,ni, 

1.1.      \iiii.|,..-|i.i,i<  t  ua- kill<-«l,  ixmi- .|H«>H. 
'"-'  '"  "  -ill.  .III.   II of  hU.tiHth." 


Fig.   104.     The  Obcr  Broadside,   1889 


Facing  page  280 


FRAUDS,  RUMORS  AND  REPORTS  281 

as  it  was  locally  well  known."  We  may  be  very  sure  that  Stiles 
would  never  have  called  this  a  Writing  Rock,  if  he  had  seen 
it.  But  his  memorandum,  of  course,  was  written  before  he 
had  gone  there  to  examine  it,  and  was  probably  based  upon  a 
distorted  rumor. 

3.  In  Beverly,  Massachusetts  and  Hampton,  New  Hamp- 
shire (Figure  104). — Two  pictographs  have  been  reported 
from  Beverly,  consisting  of  simple  scratchings  whose  meaning, 
if  they  possessed  any,  must  have  been  simple  and  unimportant 
and  is  now  undiscoverable.  One  is  on  a  small  piece  of  shale, 
reported  to  have  been  found  in  a  grave  in  1871,  and  sketched 
by  Professor  F.  W.  Putnam.  The  other  is  on  the  bottom  of  a 
steatite  pipe  of  the  platform  variety,  said  to  have  been  found  in 
a  grave,  in  1885,  by  Nathan  Patch.  We  have  expressly  ex- 
cluded such  small  decorated  articles  from  the  usual  compass  of 
this  study,  but  mention  these  because  they  have  been  regarded 
as  contributing  to  the  evidence  for  Norse  visits.  Andrew  K. 
Ober  of  Beverly  described  and  pictured  them  in  the  Beverly 
Citizen  under  dates  of  September  14  and  21,  1889,  calling  them 
supposed  maps  of  Norumbega  Harbor  and  surroundings, 
showing  the  Norsemen's  house  where  "they  dwelt  long  and 
mended  the  ship,"  and  the  keel  or  stem  of  Thorvald's  ship  as 
it  appeared  set  up  on  the  Ness.  The  first,  he  said,  was  sup- 
posed to  have  been  drawn  by  a  skraeling  Indian  or  by  a  Red 
Man  descended  from  Eirek  the  Red;  the  other  was  of  later 
date  but  traced  by  a  native  Red  Man. 

At  the  same  time,  Ober  pictured  "tracings  from  a  sculptured 
stone  at  Boar's  Head,  Hampton,  New  Hampshire,"  which  I 
have  not  seen  referred  to  elsewhere.  He  said  that  the  stone 
at  Hampton  is  "supposed  to  mark  the  site  of  Thorvald's  grave, 
A.D.  1004."  The  drawing  certainly  shows  nothing  that  could 
tempt  anyone  to  regard  the  lines  as  other  than  natural  cracks, 
veins  and  weather-marks,  or  possibly  accidental  marks  made 
by  a  plough.  It  is  an  example  of  such  "legends  and  runes  of 
credulous  days"  as  were  alluded  to  by  Whittier  in  his  "Tent 
on  the  Beach,"  whose  scene  was  laid  nearby.  Mr.  C.  C.  WH- 
loughby  tells  me  that  the  drawings  from  Beverly  are  typically 


282  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Indian,  and  that  such  pipes  as  that  on  which  one  of  them  is 
traced  frequently  have  designs  sketched  on  the  bottom.  He 
also  agrees  with  my  own  opinion  about  the  Hampton  boulder. 
He  tells  me  further  that  after  exhibiting  these  fancied  "Norse" 
memorials  in  the  Beverly  Citizen,  Ober  published  them  again 
in  some  other  paper  of  which  Willoughby  has  a  clipping,  and 
then  apparently  assembled  his  cuts  and  had  them  printed  with 
additional  text  on  single  sheets  of  paper,  which  he  distributed 
(Figure  104).  I  have  found  an  example  of  these  sheets  in 
possession  of  the  Old  Colony  Historical  Society  in  Taunton. 
On  it,  besides  the  three  items  just  described,  Ober  has  included 
a  copy  of  Pool's  drawing  from  the  West  Newbury  ledge,  stat- 
ing that  its  markings  are  "supposed  to  be  Runic  letters  of  the 
eleventh  century  with  additions  by  the  native  Red  Men  at  a 
later  date,"  and  a  cut  of  a  "foot  of  a  stone  statue  found  in 
Bradford,  Mass.,  in  or  about  1830,"  which  Mr.  Willoughby 
says  is  without  doubt  a  natural  formation. 

4.  In  Maine. — Maine  seems  to  provide  an  example  of  a 
new  and  unique  motive  serving  as  basis  for  mistaken  belief 
in  the  existence  of  old  inscriptions.  Mr.  George  R.  Burgess 
tells  me  that  there  are  painted  picture-rocks  at  Lake  Sebago, 
and  he  believes  that  they  are  freshly  painted  every  year  or  so, 
merely  for  the  purpose  of  arousing  the  interest  of  tourists. 

I  am  indebted  to  Mr.  Henry  W.  Carter  of  Providence  for 
the  description  of  a  rock  which  I  have  not  examined,  and 
which  may  be  a  genuine  petroglyph.  It  is  situated  between 
Farmington  and  West  Farmington,  about  twenty  rods  above 
the  railroad  bridge  across  Sandy  River,  a  tributary  of  the 
Kennebec.  The  rock  is  "as  big  as  a  bed,"  lying  in  the  middle 
of  the  river  and  covered  with  about  a  foot  and  a  half  of 
water  when  the  river  is  low.  On  it  are  pictures  of  a  ship, 
anchor,  flag,  and  some  writing.  These  features,  however, 
would  seem  to  indicate  white  origin  for  the  pictures,  rather 
than  Indian.  There  is  a  tradition  that,  during  the  Revolution, 
an  old  man  buried  eighty  thousand  dollars  nearby. 

In  the  remarkable  Fernald  Genealogy,  with  which  we  have 
made  acquaintance,  there  is  a  drawing  (on  page  398)  of  "Rock 
Writings  at   Damaris   Cove  Island"    (Figure   105),   and  an 


FRAUDS,  RUMORS  AND  REPORTS 


283 


absurd  "translation"  of  them  similar  to  those  that  Fernald 
made  from  Dighton  Rock.  This  is  another  example  of  a 
claimed  inscription  for  which  I  can  find  no  reputable  authority, 
and  whose  appearance  as  depicted  so  much  resembles  natural 
markings  as  to  be  worthy  of  no  serious  attention.  It  may  be 
that  there  is  some  connection  between  this  report  and  the  fact 
that  there  is  a  rock  of  some  repute  at  Damariscotta,  The  only 
account  of  it  that  I  have  seen  removes  all  mystery  from  it. 


Figure  105 — C.  A.  Fernald's  Drawing  of  Alleged  Inscription  at  Damaris 
Cove  Island,   Maine. 


This  was  a  brief  paragraph  in  the  Taunton  Gazette  of  July  1, 
1925,  which  reads  in  part  as  follows:  "Damariscotta,  Me.,  is 
brushing  the  dirt  off  her  most  famous  rock.  It  is  now  as  well 
known  as  Plymouth's  on  the  Massachusetts  bay.  This  par- 
ticular rock  marks  the  site  of  one  of  the  worst  massacres  in 
Maine.  In  1747,  in  April,  there  were  thirteen  whites  slain  by 
the  redskins  at  this  spot." 


284  DIGHTON  ROCK 

James  Phinney  Baxter  speaks  of  certain  alleged  Norse  writ- 
ings upon  the  Maine  coast,  whose  location  is  not  mentioned, 
"which  an  old  resident  in  the  vicinity  averred  that  he,  when 
a  boy,  assisted  by  other  boys,  made  upon  the  rocks,  from  time 
to  time,  for  sport.  Natural  lines  and  seams  were  brought  to- 
gether and  united  by  artificial  scratches,  and  such  additions 
were  made  as  comported  with  the  fancies  of  the  rock  artists." 
So  experienced  an  observer  as  Professor  W.  F.  Ganong  writes 
me  that  he  once  found  markings  on  a  stone  which  at  first  he 
took  to  be  undoubtedly  Indian  and  of  which  he  even  published 
an  attempted  interpretation,  but  which  he  is  now  convinced 
are  glacial  scratches. 

Another  report  for  which  there  is  no  confirmation  is  men- 
tioned by  Stiles  in  his  second  Itinerary.  On  a  map  of  islands 
in  the  mouth  of  the  Penobscot  River,  near  the  southeast 
corner  of  the  southerly  projection  of  Deer  Island,  he  marked 
the  "place  of  a  Rock  near  the  shore  ten  feet  high  &  six  or  8 
feet  wide  near  perpend  on  which  are  Figure  of  Man  Boy  Bow 
&  Arrow  &  a  fowl."  In  my  fruitless  efforts  to  discover, 
through  correspondence,  whether  such  a  rock  now  exists,  I 
have  been  informed  that  there  is  an  inscribed  rock  on  Little 
Deer  Isle.  But  I  have  not  succeeded  in  obtaining  any  descrip- 
tion of  its  appearance,  and  the  postmaster  of  the  place  writes 
to  me  that  "none  of  the  older  inhabitants  seem  to  know  any- 
thing about  it."  There  is  no  mention  of  either  of  these  rocks 
in  Hosmer's  Historical  Sketch  of  Deer  Isle,  in  1905. 

The  most  famous  inscription  in  Maine,  if  it  be  one,  is  that 
commonly  spoken  of  as  on  Monhegan  Island,  though  it  is  ac- 
tually on  Monanis,  close  by  Monhegan,  It  has  been  often  de- 
scribed and  pictured  (Figure  107).  Samuel  Adams  Drake, 
for  example,  in  his  Pine  Tree  State,  says  it  is  "generally  at- 
tributed to  the  Northmen  or  the  devil,"  although,  of  course,  as 
in  case  of  Dighton  Rock,  Phoenicians  and  other  strange  people 
have  frequently  been  regarded  as  its  authors.  Dr.  A.  E. 
Hamlin  exhibited  a  cast  of  it  at  the  Albany  meeting  of  the 
American  Association  for  the  Advancement  of  Science  in  1856, 
suggesting  that  it  was  the  work  of  "some  illiterate  Scandi- 


Fig.    106.      Photograph   of  one   siik-  of   the    llamnioiid    Tahlct 


iji. 


Fig.    107.      A.    C.    Hamlin's    drawing,    I80O,   of    alleged    inscriptit. 
at    Monhegan    Island,    Maine 

Facimj  l^agc  2S4 


FRAUDS,  RUMORS  AND  REPORTS  285 

navian,  whose  knowledge  of  the  runic  form  was  very  imper- 
fect." There  is  nothing  in  its  appearance  as  pictured  to  suggest 
dissent  from  the  opinion  expressed  by  most  authorities,  includ- 
ing Mallery,  Daniel  Wilson,  De  Costa  and  others,  that  its 
markings  are  only  "freaks  of  surface  erosion."  This  opinion 
appears  to  have  been  first  expressed,  on  the  basis  of  a  careful 
and  trustworthy  personal  examination,  by  G.  H.  Stone  in 
Science  for  1885;  and  is  confirmed,  according  to  Winsor,  by 
later  reliable  independent  investigation. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

PSYCHOLOGICAL  OBSERVATIONS 

Throughout  this  investigation  we  have  found  it  possessed 
of  many  different  features  appeaHng  to  interest — a  history 
full  of  incident  and  controversy,  inviting  to  research ;  a  succes- 
sion of  attempts  at  accurate  portrayal ;  a  searching  inquiry  into 
every  possible  theory  that  might  reveal  the  truth  as  to  origin 
and  meaning;  an  incentive  to  imaginative  flights  that  repel  us 
if  we  are  critical,  but  stimulate  the  sense  of  aesthetic  enjoyment 
as  works  of  art;  extremes  of  picturesque  humor  and  pedantic 
solemnity,  of  sound  truth-seeking  scholarship  and  deliberate  de- 
ception. Every  phase  and  feature  of  it,  however,  has  illustrated 
some  principle  of  psychology,  some  variety  of  mental  process, 
some  type  of  human  intellect  and  feeling.  It  was  the  psycho- 
logical interest  of  the  endless  variety  of  observation  and  theory 
which  was  responsible  for  drawing  the  writer  into  the  intri- 
cacies of  the  research,  and  it  does  not  seem  inappropriate  to 
include  some  discussion  of  the  psychological  features  that  he 
has  contrived  to  find  in  it.  There  are  "sermons  in  stones," 
and  an  especially  good  one  in  stones  such  as  these  that  we  have 
been  studying. 

The  psychological  features  naturally  lie  not  in  the  stones 
themselves,  but  in  their  human  relationships.  These  are  of 
several  kinds.  For  one  thing,  this  case  is  one  among  countless 
others  that  illustrate  how,  as  Baring-Gould  expresses  it,  "the 
restless  mind  of  man,  ever  seeking  a  reason  to  account  for  the 
marvels  presented  to  his  senses,  adopts  one  theory  after  an- 
other"^ in  endless  and  intricate  variety — a  ceaseless  budding- 
out  process  of  men's  speculations  about  things  that  are  mys- 
terious, as  we  called  it  in  our  discussion  of  cup-stones.  The 
whole  story  is  a  dramatic  movement  of  many  conflicting  motifs, 

^  Ctirions  Myths  of  the  Middle  Ages,  "Schamir,"  at  end. 

286 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  OBSERVATIONS  287 

developing  picturesquely,  through  various  stages  and  with 
many  actors,  toward  a  definite  goal.  In  this  way  it  is  like  a 
symphony,  or  a  life,  or  an  Idea  unfolding  from  crude  begin- 
nings through  constant  inadequacy  and  struggle  to  complete 
content  and  truth.  Of  such  a  nature  is  the  history  of  every- 
thing and  of  everyone  possessed  of  a  spiritual  personality,  a 
purposive  life  which  in  its  total  unity  but  manifold  content 
and  process  has  individual  significance  and  value.  Those  who 
have  felt  the  dramatic  appeal  of  our  story  throughout  its  course 
will  grasp  what  is  here  hinted  at. 

Concerning  the  producers  of  the  petroglyphs,  I  shall  con- 
tent myself  with  merely  calling  attention  to  the  error  of  those 
who  have  believed  that  Indians  were  too  lazy  and  idle  to  have 
been  capable  of  the  work,  or  that,  so  far  as  it  is  Indian,  later 
Indians  would  necessarily  know  of  its  origin  and  be  able  to 
interpret  it  correctly.  What  kind  of  motives  led  them  to  the 
work,  what  impulses  or  thoughts  or  feelings  they  were  seeking 
to  express,  is  a  question  that  has  been  introduced  already  while 
examining  the  facts  concerning  particular  rocks,  and  can  re- 
ceive fuller  discussion  more  appropriately  when  we  attempt  to 
arrive  at  our  final  conclusions.  Two  matters,  however,  can  be 
advantageously  considered  here, — the  types  of  men  who  have 
engaged  in  these  discussions,  and  the  principles  of  observation 
and  belief  that  are  illustrated  in  their  contributions. 

1.  Types  of  mental  attitudes  and  types  of  men.  A  number 
of  times  during  the  course  of  this  study  attention  has  been 
called  to  the  characteristics  of  a  certain  type  of  writer  and 
deviser  of  theories  in  whose  case  "waking  dreams"  are  taken 
for  realities.  Gebelin,  Hill,  Dammartin,  Magnusen,  Onflfroy 
de  Thoron,  Fernald, — will  be  recalled  as  examples.  Other  and 
saner,  though  perhaps  less  picturesque  writers,  have  spoken  of 
the  productions  of  such  men  by  various  uncomplimentary 
names :  "air  built  fabrics,"  "humbugs,"  "enthusiastic  rubbish," 
"laborious  trifling,"  and  many  longer  and  equally  disparaging 
phrases. 

At  the  other  extreme  from  these  Don  Quixotes  of  science 
are  the  plain,  matter-of-fact,  unimaginative  fellows  who  make 


288  DIGHTON  ROCK 

everything  dry  and  commonplace.  When  accompanied  by  care- 
ful and  exhaustive  accumulation  of  evidence,  their  attitude 
becomes  a  part  of  the  true  method  of  science.  But  through 
haste,  ignorance,  prejudice  or  natural  narrow-mindedness,  they 
are  quite  as  apt  to  be  one-idea  men  as  the  others,  and  accord- 
ingly no  more  likely  to  hit  upon  the  truth.  These  are  little 
attracted  by  mysteries.  Consequently  we  have  few  of  them 
writing  upon  our  subject,  and  can  mention  as  best  examples 
only  those  who  dismiss  the  matter  briefly  with  the  remark  that 
the  apparent  inscription  is  the  work  of  nature  or  accident  only. 
We  are  thus  safe  in  including,  it  would  seem,  at  least  Douglass, 
John  Whipple,  and  the  writer  in  the  English  Review. 

Between  the  two  extremes  lie  the  more  versatile  minds. 
They  possess  imagination,  but  restrained  and  tempered  by  the 
more  prosaic  qualities.  The  combination  may  be  an  habitual 
one,  or  the  two  may  alternate,  either  in  dififerent  moods  or  as 
applied  to  different  subjects.  In  either  case,  the  result  may  be 
good  or  bad,  according  to  the  appropriateness  of  the  distribu- 
tion. Such  men,  as  well  as  the  preceding,  may  lack  the  pains- 
taking industry  and  the  breadth  of  mind  that  lead  to  truth  and 
so  be  as  unreliable  as  their  fellows.  At  their  best,  we  find  them 
holding  fast  to  fact,  so  far  as  research  has  yet  supplied  it,  but 
communicating  it  with  grace  of  expression,  with  sympathetic 
understanding  of  opposing  views,  and  with  appreciation  of  its 
appeal  to  the  aesthetic  feelings  as  well  as  to  the  intellect.  Strict 
in  their  acceptance  of  evidence  and  formulation  of  truth,  they 
can  then  relax  in  order  to  enjoy  its  poetry  and  beauty,  and  even 
appreciate  these  qualities  in  the  whole  struggle  for  truth  and 
thus  in  its  stages  of  error  as  well  as  of  attainment. 

Professor  James  drew  a  distinction  between  what  he  called 
the  easy-going  and  the  strenuous  moods.  The  distinction  is 
much  like  that  between  our  two  extreme  types,  if  we  take  it  as 
referring  not  to  amount  but  to  tenseness  of  activity.  Our  first 
type  is  easy  going;  but  it  may  be  exceedingly  industrious  and 
in  that  sense  strenuous,  and  the  other  very  little  so.  Another 
pair  of  terms,  soft  and  hard,  among  those  used  by  James,  comes 
nearer  to  expressing  the  essence  of  our  distinction.    I  shall  call 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  OBSERVATIONS  289 

them,  however,  by  names  that  apply  both  to  the  type  and  to  its 
underlying  causes:  first,  the  "lax"  or  "relaxed;"  at  opposite 
extreme,  the  "tense;"  between,  the  "supple."  For  it  is  just 
these  characters  of  muscular  adjustment  attending  the  processes 
of  observing,  remembering,  reasoning,  acting  and  feeling  that 
determine  the  mental  and  personal  differences  to  which  atten- 
tion has  been  called.  At  their  greatest  extremes,  laxness  be- 
comes flabby  and  tenseness  becomes  rigid  and  cramped.  When 
crystallized  into  abiding  personal  traits  these  two,  whether  as 
greater  or  more  moderate  extremes,  become  unchanging  types 
of  personality.  But  in  those  who  are  supple  of  mind  and 
muscle  they  rarely  become  extreme,  and  are  alternating  atti- 
tudes of  mind  or  merge  into  a  permanent  attitude  of  poise  or 
balance.  In  every  case,  the  relaxed  attitude  is  favorable  to 
imagination  and  feeling,  and  also,  if  not  at  the  same  time 
narrow,  to  sympathetic  understanding  of  others.  Tenseness, 
if  too  firm  and  unadaptable,  like  imagination  and  feeling  un- 
restrained, leads  to  nothing  admirable;  but  when,  instead  of 
being  rigid,  it  becomes  supple  self-adjustment  to  conditions, 
delicately  changing  with  their  changing  character,  it  is  the 
foundation  of  accurate  and  exact  observation  and  thought.  The 
supple,  balanced  attitude  is  ready  to  meet  either  demand,  for 
relaxation  or  for  adjustment,  and  thus  is  best  adapted  to  arrive 
at  wide-visioned  truth  in  all  its  forms.  We  have  met  with 
numerous  examples  of  its  possession  by  the  partakers  in  our 
discussions,  more  or  less  successful  according  to  the  range  of 
information  and  degree  of  attention  devoted  to  the  subject.  It 
hardly  demands  further  description.  About  the  extremer  types 
much  further  may  be  said. 

A  few  simple  illustrations  will  assist  in  realizing  the  unes- 
capable  dependence  of  the  mental  types  and  attitudes  on  muscu- 
lar tendencies.  We  know  that  mental  relaxation  demands 
bodily  relaxation,  and  the  two  together  favor  the  free  play  of 
fancy  and  disconnected  ideas;  while  to  observe  accurately  and 
to  reason  logically  requires  an  alertness  and  appropriate  ad- 
justment of  muscles  as  well  as  of  mind.  There  are  intoxicants 
and  drugs  that  render  exact  observation  impossible,  foster  illu- 
sions, stimulate  wild  trains  of  imagery  and  thought,  diminish 


290  DIGHTON  ROCK 

control  in  speech,  expression  and  action;  and  they  accomplish 
it  largely  through  relaxing  the  muscular  adjustments  and  con- 
trols. On  the  other  hand,  the  words  keen,  alert,  vigorous, 
eager,  intent,  virile,  call  attention  to  conditions  of  muscular 
tonus  as  well  as  of  mind,  that  are  bound  to  one  another  indis- 
solubly.  Exactly  adjusted  conditions  of  muscles  that  assist  in 
close  attention  are  essential  to  reliable  observation,  and  loose 
adjustment  tends  to  substitute  the  imagined  for  the  real. 

Yet  our  loose-muscled  and  loose-minded  friends  are  no 
less  confident  of  the  reality  of  their  visions  than  are  those  whose 
felicitous  adjustments  make  their  observations  and  reasonings 
more  trustworthy,  or  those  who  make  another  type  of  error 
through  ill-adjustment  arising  from  excessive  and  unadaptable 
tenseness.  Confidence  and  sureness  of  being  right  as  readily 
attend  narrow-visioned  error  as  wide-visioned  truth.  The  lax 
and  the  over-tense  are  very  liable  to  be  narrow-minded ;  and  the 
supple  may  be  so,  on  some  or  all  subjects,  through  ignorance, 
or  haste,  or  laziness,  or  forget  fulness,  or  lack  of  system,  or 
emotional  appeal,  or  habit,  or  other  causes.  In  all  three  types, 
the  single  unopposed  idea  seems  right,  since  belief  arises  as 
inevitably  from  absence  of  anything  that  contradicts  as  from 
the  triumph  of  well-reasoned  ideas.  The  confidence,  therefore, 
with  which  anyone  asserts  that  he  has  observed  a  fact,  or  re- 
members clearly,  or  knows  a  thing  to  be  true,  cannot  be  accepted 
as  having  in  itself  any  value  as  evidence.  It  may  attach  to  any 
kind  of  an  idea,  theory,  or  supposed  fact.  It  will  have  different 
attendant  characteristics,  however,  in  the  different  types.  In 
the  loose  adjustment  to  realities  of  those  who  pin  their  faith  to 
figments,  it  is  more  apt  to  be  a  genial  ignoring  of  other  possi- 
bilities ;  while  at  the  opposite  extreme  it  is  an  active  and  obsti- 
nate hostility  toward  them.  These  considerations  find  abun- 
dant application  in  this  particular  study. 

Typical  laxity  or  tenseness,  as  permanent  type  or  temporary 
attitude,  affects  the  whole  range  of  mental  processes  and  action. 
For  illustrations,  we  must  here  resort  exclusively  to  the  loose 
type,  for  there  are  too  few  of  the  opposite  kind  in  our  history 
and  they  treat  the  subject  too  briefly  to  make  it  possible  to  dis- 
sect them.     But  this  is  just  the  kind  of  a  mystery  to  appeal  to 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  OBSERVATIONS  291 

the  imaginative  and  induce  them  to  lay  bare  their  whole  nature. 
Accordingly  we  find  the  advocates  of  startling  theories  con- 
sistently careless  and  inaccurate  in  observation,  uncritical  and 
inexact  in  dealing  with  their  accepted  sources,  unsystematic  and 
often  self -contradictory  and  illogical  in  their  theories.  They 
are  strongly  ruled  by  their  feelings,  and  are  therefore  attracted 
particularly  by  beliefs  that  pleasantly  stimulate  the  imagination 
and  possess  a  poetic  appeal.  They  are  not  to  be  trusted  in  their 
statements  of  fact,  their  quotations  from  others,  their  processes 
of  reasoning.  They  see  weird  and  wonderful  objects  depicted 
in  the  drawings.  They  are  very  often  confused  in  their  ar- 
rangement of  data  and  ungrammatical  in  their  manner  of 
speech.  Ira  Hill,  Asahel  Davis,  and  Fernald  are  shining 
examples.  Any  one,  in  moments  of  relaxation  or  in  dealing 
with  special  topics,  may  make  errors  of  any  of  the  kinds  here 
noted,  without  implication  that  their  makers  belong  habitually 
to  the  lax  type.  But  the  incurably  lax-minded  exhibits  a  lax 
adjustment  of  muscles  in  all  of  his  processes  that  renders 
exactness,  clarity  and  consistency  impossible  in  any  field  of 
mental  activity,  and  makes  him  liable  to  errors  and  inade- 
quacies of  all  varieties. 

When  narrowness  of  vision,  habitual  or  occasional,  com- 
bines with  these  muscularly  founded  qualities,  it  produces  a 
number  of  characteristic  manifestations.  The  idea  that  appeals 
leaves  no  room  for  rivals,  and  its  possessor  when  confronted 
with  other  possibilities,  unless  confused  or  vacillating,  must 
either  ignore  their  existence  or  disparage  their  importance. 
Such  people  are  necessarily  unsympathetic,  seeing  no  merit  or 
virtue  in  their  opponents.  In  argument,  if  driven  from  one 
defence  they  resort  to  a  second,  and  on  demolishment  of  that 
they  resort  again  to  the  first  as  though  it  had  never  been 
touched.  They  cannot  be  doubters,  for  that  attitude  demands 
sufficient  breadth  to  entertain  various  possibilities  at  once.  They 
therefore  have  complete  confidence  in  their  own  reliability,  the 
faithful  care  and  accuracy  of  their  drawings,  and  the  truth  of 
their  own  beliefs.  These  facts  are  well  illustrated  throughout 
the  discussions  that  we  have  been  following. 

Besides  these  general  effects,  narrow  vision  produces  differ- 


292  DIGHTON  ROCK 

ing  results  in  our  different  types.  Of  the  more  balanced  kind, 
we  need  only  say  that  it  makes  them  superficial,  hence  careless 
and  inexact.  In  the  others,  entertaining  no  doubts  as  to  the 
correctness  of  their  views,  it  is  apt  to  induce  a  large  self-impor- 
tance, but  differently  manifested  in  the  two.  The  loose  type  is 
more  genial,  the  tense  more  blustering.  The  former  have  solved 
deep  mysteries  and  made  great  discoveries :  Mathieu,  of  the  art 
of  reading  hieroglyphics ;  Onffroy  de  Thoron,  of  the  primitive 
language;  Fernald,  of  the  same,  and  of  the  primitive  alphabet 
of  lines;  Lundy,  of  the  Mongolian  symbolism  of  writing; 
Dammartin,  of  the  origin  of  all  alphabetic  characters  in  the 
constellations.  Gebelin  was  an  expert  and  highly  gifted  reader  of 
Phoenician  characters,  Samuel  Harris  an  almost  super-natural 
linguist,  Magnusen  a  master  of  runes.  These  men  are  not  often 
combative,  and  for  the  most  part  ignore  alternative  views, 
or  dismiss  them  with  easy  grace.  We  are  more  amused  than 
offended  by  their  pretentious  claims.  But  those  who  are  over- 
tense  as  well  as  over-narrow,  unless  kept  servile  by  authority, 
are  the  easiest  victims  of  an  offensive  megalomania  which 
makes  them  blind  ruthless  Huns,  arrogant,  pompous,  bluster- 
ing, dealing  out  contempt,  abuse  and  ridicule  to  their  enemies. 
Our  history  has  furnished  us  with  a  few  mild  illustrations  of 
the  type,  which  we  see  at  work  in  Douglass's  attitude  toward 
Cotton  Mather,  in  Vallancey  as  described  by  Ledwich,  and  in  a 
few  other  instances  where  abuse  takes  the  place  of  argument. 
One  of  the  best  examples  I  have  found  is  contained  in  a  private 
letter  of  long  ago  which,  as  it  was  not  designed  for  publication, 
I  quote  without  mention  of  its  author.  As  so  often  in  like 
cases,  he  appears  to  mirror  his  own  egotism  in  the  abusive 
terms  which  he  applies  to  those  whose  beliefs  do  not  agree  with 
his: 

There  are  many  wise-acres  in  this  country  and  Europe  whose 
zeal  far  outstrips  their  wisdom  and  who  endeavor  to  make  up  for 
want  of  knowledge  by  bold  assertions  and  wholesale  statements. 
With  these  would-be  wise  ones  the  [advocates  of  a  certain  theory] 
have  constituted  a  fruitful  topic  for  gibes  and  jeers;  in  their  self- 
conceit  and  gross  ignorance,  they  have  deemed  themselves  amply 
qualified  to  sit  in  judgment,  and  with  a  boldness  of  which  "none 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  OBSERVATIONS  293 

but  itself  can  be  its  parallel,"  they  have  not  hesitated  to  act  as 
judges,  jurors  and  witnesses  in  the  case  at  issue.  And  who  has 
by  them  been  often  arraigned  as  a  set  of  ignoramuses,  historic 
falsifiers,  and  visionary  theorists?  At  one  time  these  "Know- 
Everythings"  labored  most  vigorously  to  break  the  Dighton  Rock 
to  pieces. 

Yet  even  this  is  mild  in  comparison  with  Fernald's  ap- 
parently honest  conviction  that  those  who  disagree  with  his 
opinions  necessarily  "will  be,  are  those,  who  profit  by  ignorance 
and  sin." 

2.  The  extent  to  which  apperception  enters  into  all  in- 
tellectual processes  is  one  of  the  clearest  facts  to  which  our 
studies  contribute  evidence.  We  neither  perceive  nor  believe 
anything  on  the  basis  of  presented  data  alone.  By  themselves 
they  are  always  too  meagre  and  too  detached  to  possess  any 
significance  at  all.  They  must  be  given  meaning,  distinction, 
relation,  completer  filling  and  objective  reality  by  aid  of  our 
own  reactions  and  of  our  organized  past  experience  before 
they  can  become  for  us  objects  or  truths.  It  is  this  process  that 
is  called  apperception.  There  is  a  class  of  modern  realists  who 
deny  or  minimize  its  existence;  but  their  claims  are  irreconcil- 
able with  sound  handling  of  the  facts,  and  incapable  of  de- 
tailed organization  and  explanation  of  them.  Whenever  we 
perceive  an  object,  as  by  looking  at  it,  it  is  not  the  object  itself, 
complete  and  unchanged,  that  in  some  mysterious  manner 
enters  into  the  mind;  nor  the  mind,  looking  out  from  itself, 
that  magically  knows  the  genuine  external  reality  as  it  actually 
exists  there  outside  the  mind ;  nor  an  incomprehensible  relation 
between  the  two  that  itself  is  the  knowing.  To  be  acceptable,  a 
scientific  hypothesis  must  take  into  account  every  single  one  of 
the  pertinent  indubitable  facts,  fit  each  into  its  definite  place  in 
a  harmonious  system,  account  for  all  distinctions  and  variations 
and  conditions.  These  forms  of  realism  treat  all  cases  by  the 
one  invariable  formula,  make  but  the  one  undifferentiated  and 
unsupported  claim,  possess  plausibility  only  as  long  as  they  con- 
fine themselves  to  generalities,  and  have  no  power  to  enter  into 
the  minute  explanation  of  the  million  details  and  distinctions 
that  must  be  examined  and  assigned  each  to  its  separate  definite 


294  DIGHTON  ROCK 

cause.  They  are  all  mere  hocus-pocus  and  magic.  A  magic 
power  or  explanation  is  one  that,  without  any  causally  deter- 
mined differences  in  itself,  is  supposed  to  create  or  account 
for  a  variety  of  results.  A  scientific  cause  or  explanation  is 
one  within  which  is  a  causally  determined  difference  for  each 
difference  that  is  to  be  explained.  There  is  but  one  account  of 
the  facts  which,  while  it  has  not  solved  all  problems,  is  yet 
inherently  capable  of  accomplishing  the  task. 

The  things  outside  us  do  not  enter  our  senses.  Nor  do  they 
throw  off  sensations  which  faithfully  represent  them  and  suc- 
ceed in  penetrating  the  mind.  Instead,  the  process  is  a  complex 
one.  The  forces  of  light,  heat,  pressure,  molecular  activity, 
and  the  others,  themselves  determined  by  the  activities  of  what 
we  call  the  objects  outside  us  and  the  internal  activities  of  our 
own  bodies,  excite  appropriate  sense-organs  to  a  discharge  of 
their  stored  neural  energies.  These  set  cortical  cells  in  our 
brains  into  activity,  and  when  this  happens  there  arise  as  facts 
of  consciousness,  by  a  law  which  most  psychologists  accept  as 
parallelism,  the  phenomena  that  we  call  sensations.  These  are 
wholly  mental  contents  and  cannot  by  any  possibility  resemble 
in  the  slightest  particular  the  external  things  and  qualities  and 
forces  which  have  aroused  them.  But  these  sensations,  though 
in  our  minds,  we  do  not  yet  know.  By  wholly  unconscious  but 
accountable  processes,  we  select  certain  ones  among  them  all 
at  any  particular  moment  and  neglect  the  rest ;  then  add  to  these 
a  mass  of  selected  "kinsesthetic"  sensations  arising  from  our 
own  muscular  adjustments  to  the  ones  first  named;  then  incor- 
porate these  into  an  organized  mass  of  earlier  sense-experiences, 
into  which  they  will  acceptably  fit ;  then  substitute  some  features 
involved  in  the  latter  for  some  of  the  sensations  that  are  actu- 
ally presented ;  then,  instead  of  realizing  that  we  have  done  any 
of  these  things  and  that  the  product  is  wholly  in  the  mind,  we 
believe  it  to  have  existence  outside  us ;  and  then  at  last — numer- 
ous as  the  stages  are,  for  us  they  appear  practically  instantane- 
ous— we  become  aware  of  the  complex  "externalized"  fabric, 
and  believe  it  to  be  the  observed  external  object.  Such  is  the 
process  of  apperception.  Without  it  we  can  observe  nothing, 
not  even  the  plain  original  sensations.    It  enters  necessarily  into 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  OBSERVATIONS  295 

what  we  call  correct  perception  as  well  as  into  illusion,  into 
that  of  the  psychologist,  the  physical  scientist,  the  plain  man,  as 
well  as  of  the  visionary.  It  is  less  easy  to  prove  it  for  ordinary 
clear  perception,  especially  with  the  materials  furnished  us  in 
this  study,  than  for  the  perception  of  faint  and  confused  ob- 
jects.   In  the  case  of  the  latter  it  can  be  made  very  evident, 

A  few  years  ago  there  were  observed,  at  a  laboratory  in 
Nancy,  faintly  visible  emanations  of  a  new  kind,  which  were 
called  n-rays,  A  whole  series  of  definite  properties  was  worked 
out  for  them,  a  considerable  number  of  reputable  scientists  con- 
firmed them,  a  long  series  of  scientific  papers  was  written  con- 
cerning them — and  they  were  proved  in  the  end  to  be  purely 
subjective  phenomena.  Nothing  could  have  established  more 
clearly  the  fact  that  it  is  impossible  for  anyone  to  distinguish 
between  faint  objective  and  vivid  subjective  appearances.  If 
not  accepted  as  externally  real,  it  is  not  because  anyone  is  acute 
enough  to  make  this  distinction,  but  because  their  behavior  is 
reconcilable  only  with  subjective  and  not  with  objective  exist- 
ences. If  they  accord  with  all  the  rest  of  what  he  knows  and 
believes  about  external  facts,  he  must  class  them  with  the 
latter.  Something  similar  is  true  of  plainly  visible  external 
things.  For  a  simple  case,  take  a  series  of  parallel  lines  and 
mentally  group  them  together  in  pairs.  The  spaces  between 
them  are  all  alike,  but  they  will  no  longer  appear  so.  Within  a 
group,  the  space  takes  on  the  appearance  of  a  surface  bounded 
by  the  lines;  between  groups  are  mere  emptinesses.  Or  ex- 
amine a  puzzle-picture,  or  such  ambiguous  pictures  as  the  one 
that  may  be  seen  either  as  a  duck  or  as  a  rabbit,  or  the  diagrams 
of  ambiguous  perspective  shown  in  many  text-books  on  psy- 
chology. Apperception,  aided  by  appropriate  muscular  adjust- 
ments and  their  resulting  kinaesthetic  sensations,  makes  each 
alternative  real  in  its  turn.  In  extreme  cases,  like  that  of  the 
opium-stimulated  brain,  everything  may  be  thus  ambiguous. 
Again,  everyone  knows  how  easy  it  is  to  see  pictures  that  at 
least  almost  seem  real  things  in  clouds,  in  flames  and  embers, 
in  wall-paper  patterns,  in  the  graining  of  wood  and  veining  of 
marble,  in  frost-covered  window-panes,  A  sheet  of  marbled 
paper  is  inserted  in  Sterne's  Tristram  Shandy  as  material  for 


296  DIGHTON  ROCK 

the  exercise  of  this  diversion.  Irregular  ink-blots  are  excellent 
material.  In  commenting  on  Dammartin,  we  demonstrated 
that  any  desired  outline  figure  could  be  found  in  the  constella- 
tions. Any  complex  collection  where  something  is  to  be  taken 
as  real  and  some  parts  ignored  as  irrelevant  serves  this  purpose. 
What  is  seen  in  these  instances  we  know  to  be  our  own  fanciful 
creation,  but  only  because  we  know  that  the  things  seen  cannot 
possibly  exist  in  those  places.  Our  belief  about  them  will  be 
very  different  if  nothing  in  our  experience  contradicts  their 
objective  reality.  Whenever  we  can,  we  tend  to  find  something 
definite  in  the  faint  and  orderly  in  the  confused  and  to  trust 
what  we  find,  if  it  and  other  things  and  our  system  of  beliefs 
will  permit  it.  There  is  a  pleasure  in  seeing  uncertainties  and 
irregularities  resolve  themselves  into  definite  form,  and  the 
forms  take  on  connected  and  acceptable  meaning.  If  the  criti- 
cal attitude  be  not  aroused  or  find  no  support,  if  no  conflicting 
appearances  or  beliefs  occur  to  mind,  if  rival  possibilities  arouse 
no  liking,  the  apperceptively  constructed  object  must  be  believed 
to  be  external.  In  that  very  way  we  construct  all  objects  that 
we  actually  do  accept  as  genuinely  perceived,  even  the  most 
sure  and  familiar  ones. 

Some  of  the  alleged  indentures  of  Dighton  Rock  are  un- 
questionably there,  artificially  carved  upon  it.  But  aside  from 
them  it  offers  an  ideal  surface  for  these  borderland  appercep- 
tions which  may  or  may  not  represent  objective  facts.  Exami- 
nation either  of  the  rock  itself  or  of  a  clear  photograph  of  it 
reveals  both  features  under  discussion — an  abundance  of  lines 
that  are  faint  and  doubtful,  and  a  vast  confusion  of  other  marks 
that  are  clearly  observable  and  may  or  may  not  be  artificial. 
There  are  numberless  little  pittings  and  protrusions,  irregu- 
larities of  texture,  almost  eroded  remnants  of  indecipherable 
characters,  minute  cracks,  light-reflections  varying  from  dark 
to  bright  forming  dots  and  lines  and  blotches,  small  differences 
of  color.  Such  materials  can  be  woven  together  apperceptively 
into  a  thousand  varying  forms.  For  the  purpose  of  comparing 
the  different  drawings,  none  of  which  can  be  exact  enough  to 
show  the  precise  position  on  the  rock  where  each  figure  belongs, 
I  tried  at  one  time  to  identify  and  mark  on  the  Burgess  photo- 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  OBSERVATIONS  297 

graph  every  figure  that  had  ever  been  drawn  or  chalked,  and 
thus  to  produce  a  composite  representation  of  them  all.  I 
found  the  task  almost  impossible,  not  because  I  could  not  dis- 
cover the  figures  in  any  case,  but  because  I  could  see  many 
of  them  in  too  many  different  places.  For  instance,  at  the 
extreme  left  of  the  rock  some  of  the  drawings  show  a  P,  which 
at  different  times  I  placed  in  at  least  four  plausible  positions; 
and  as  to  others  I  was  equally  uncertain.  My  notes  state  that 
"after  prolonged  and  close  searching,  I  got  so  that  I  could  find 
any  given  figure  almost  anywhere." 

Those  who  are  cautious  and  instructed  in  the  dangers  will 
know  enough  not  to  trust  any  but  the  most  indubitable  of  the 
figures  they  see.  But  even  they  will  find  it  difficult  to  know 
where  to  draw  the  line  between  the  sure  and  the  doubtful. 
Kendall  and  Seager  were  the  most  cautious  draughtsmen  who 
ever  viewed  the  rock;  yet  their  drawings  are  very  different. 
Very  few  are  sufficiently  instructed  to  be  cautious.  To  look 
for  what  has  been  carved  there  insures  the  seeing  of  something 
among  the  thousand  possibilities.  The  very  seeing  of  a  plaus- 
ible figure  makes  it  seem  to  be  actually  present  on  the  rock. 
It  may  dissolve  and  give  place  to  another,  and  if  not  satisfying 
it  probably  will.  But  the  situation  here  differs  from  that  when 
we  are  deliberately  looking  for  what  we  know  will  be  only 
dream-pictures.  We  can  adopt  that  attitude  toward  the  rock  or 
its  photograph;  but  not  if  we  are  earnestly  trying  to  discover 
everything  possible  of  what  was  originally  carved  there.  Then, 
any  plausible  and  consistent  appearance  tends  to  be  taken  as 
objective  and  to  inhibit  the  many  alternative  and  mutually  ex- 
clusive things  that  might  have  been  seen  in  the  same  place.  The 
lines  and  dots  have  been  apperceived  into  an  object.  The 
fact  that  it  is  one's  own  discovery  gives  it  strength.  I  f ,  in  addi- 
tion, it  for  any  reason  appeals  to  the  feelings,  or  best  among 
various  possibilities  fits  in  with  a  preformed  hypothesis,  its  full 
acceptance  is  almost  inevitable. 

It  is  easy  to  see  why  the  many  drawings  and  chalkings  are 
so  definite  and  likewise  so  different.  Some  of  the  causes  are 
external.  The  lighting  of  the  rock  differs  greatly  with  the 
position  of  the  sun,  and  is  of  exceedingly  great  importance  for 


298  DIGHTON  ROCK 

the  relative  observability  and  distinctness  of  different  figures. 
So  also  is  the  position  of  the  observer.  Carelessness  and  vary- 
ing skill  have  some  influence.  But  the  most  potent  cause  of  all 
lies  in  the  apperceptive  factors.  For  the  most  part  these  make 
for  variety,  although  within  rather  definite  limitations,  for  no 
one  yields  to  unrestrained  imagination  but  rejects  such  apper- 
ceptions as  have  no  plausible  nucleus  in  actual  objective  data. 
Yet  in  some  cases  the  objective  lines  may  be  most  readily 
apperceived  in  a  manner  that  is  almost  uniform  and  that  never- 
theless may  be  mistaken,  as  in  case  of  the  small  human  figure 
seen  by  nearly  all  observers  where  I  now  find  the  date  1511 
with  circles  above  and  below  it.  The  apperceptive  possibilities 
wherever  the  lines  are  not  sure  and  definite  are  so  numerous 
that  no  one  has  yet  exhausted  them.  We  can  constantly  find 
new  and  unsuspected  letters  and  figures  with  more  or  less  of 
confidence  in  their  actual  presence  on  the  rock.  They  may  come 
by  accident,  as  in  case  of  the  1511,  or  by  definitely  looking  for 
them  under  the  inspiration  of  a  new  theory  as  to  what  may  be 
there,  as  in  case  of  my  discovery  of  the  Cortereal.  Very  few 
if  any  of  the  draughtsmen  and  chalkers,  I  think,  have  been 
biased  by  definite  ideas  beforehand  of  figures  they  wished  to 
find,  except  in  so  far  as  they  have  been  influenced  by  knowledge 
of  previous  depictions.  Had  they  been  so,  they  would  probably 
have  found  what  they  sought.  Moreover,  they  would  almost 
inevitably  have  been  in  error,  for  there  can  be  but  one  right 
theory,  but  there  may  be  devised  a  host  of  wrong  ones.  Yet 
we  must  realize  that  bias  in  the  one  right  direction  may  be  as 
essential  to  the  correct  solution  of  some  difficult  scientific  prob- 
lems, as  bias  in  the  numberless  wrong  directions  is  unfavorable. 
In  dealing  with  obscure  and  ambiguous  phenomena,  the  genu- 
ine truth  about  them  is  more  likely  to  be  perceived  after  the 
hypothesis  that  later  proves  to  be  the  correct  one  has  suggested 
exactly  what  to  look  for. 

If  anyone  finds  it  difficult  to  believe  that  apperception  can 
create  objective  fact,  or  to  see  how  so  many  different  represen- 
tations can  have  been  made  honestly  from  the  same  model,  it 
may  be  recommended  that  he  study  for  himself  the  Burgess  or 
the  Hathaway  photograph.     Let  him  try  to  localize  in  the 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  OBSERVATIONS  299 

photograph  the  lines  of  any  particular  drawing,  or  make  his 
own  drawing  showing  every  line  that  he  thinks  is  probably 
artificial.  He  can  inevitably  bring  himself  to  the  discovery  of 
any  desired  figure,  though  not  necessarily  with  sufficient  clear- 
ness to  satisfy  him.  His  own  independent  depiction  will  differ, 
if  made  detailed  enough,  for  all  except  well  marked  lines,  from 
any  others.  Moreover,  the  psychology  of  the  chalking  process 
can  be  readily  and  experimentally  studied  in  the  same  manner. 
Before  rendering  any  lines  of  the  photograph  more  distinct  by 
means  of  ink  or  pencil,  there  are  numerous  possibilities  as  to 
what  may  be  seen  in  a  given  region.  But  once  mark  a  line 
clearly,  and  many  of  these  possibilities  are  obscured  or  vanish. 
A  set  is  established  toward  seeing  one  or  more  definite  figures, 
instead  of  many  possible  ones.  The  fixing  of  one  line  more 
nearly  determines  its  neighbors;  until  finally,  a  single  definite 
and  solely  visible  figure  stands  out,  where  at  first  others  might 
equally  well  have  been  seen.  Had  one  started  by  marking  some 
other  line,  the  resulting  figure  would  have  turned  out,  in  many 
instances,  a  very  different  one. 

There  is  now  one  point  more  to  develop  before  we  close  this 
study.  We  form  our  system  of  beliefs,  or  our  interpretation  of 
any  particular  phenomenon,  by  a  process  very  like  the  apper- 
ception that  has  just  been  described.  We  sift  and  select  among 
the  materials  actually  given,  ignoring  what  rightly  or  wrongly 
we  regard  as  irrelevant.  We  fill  out  the  inadequacies  of  the 
rest,  rounding  it  into  a  full  idea,  by  aid  of  our  stored  experience 
and  completing  hypotheses.  According  to  the  scientific  strict- 
ness or  the  looseness  and  insufficiency  of  our  apperceptive  sys- 
tems, the  result  is  more  or  less  able  to  bear  the  scrutiny  of 
sound  criticism.  Of  all  our  interpreters  and  theorizers,  only 
the  advocates  of  Indian  origin,  or  those  who  have  cautiously 
refrained  from  forming  any  final  opinion,  have  possessed  a 
system  of  interpretative  beliefs  into  which  the  data  given  by 
the  drawings  could  fit  in  such  a  manner  as  to  yield  truth.  It 
may  be — or  may  not  be — ^that  our  new  hypothesis  concerning 
Miguel  Cortereal  can  eventually  be  added  to  the  Indian  theory 
as  also  having  scientific  warrant.  With  respect  to  it,  we  await 
such  ultimate  fate  as   future  research  may  determine.     The 


300  DIGHTON  ROCK 

extremest  methods  of  indefensible  yet  very  natural  interpreta- 
tion are  those  that  accept  particular  pictures  as  symbolizing  en- 
tire incidents  or  characters  in  a  story,  with  no  other  warrant 
than  consistency  with  their  own  beliefs,  or  that  regard  single 
supposed  letters  as  initials  of  complete  words.  There  is  very 
little  difference  in  principle  between  these  two  procedures.  They 
are  essentially  identical  with  one  of  the  cabalistic  methods  called 
notarikon,  wherein  every  letter  of  a  word  is  taken  as  the  initial 
or  abbreviation  of  another  word,  so  that  from  the  letters  of  a 
single  word  a  complete  sentence  may  be  formed.  Buckingham 
Smith  used  a  mild  form  of  this  process.  It  is  perhaps  not 
unlikely  that  Lundy's  Chinese  radicals  were  used  in  a  similar 
manner.  When  the  letters  to  be  thus  used  are  not  taken  in 
succession  but  selected  at  random  from  a  large  collection  in  any 
desired  order,  there  are  no  limits  to  what  they  may  be  made  to 
mean.  Fernald  permitted  us  a  few  insights  into  his  manner 
of  finding  the  meanings  he  wanted.  It  was  not  wholly  crazy 
and  baseless,  for  there  was  something  of  system  in  it.  But 
the  system,  wherever  we  found  it  possible  to  follow  its  work- 
ings, was  this  super-cabalistic  notarikon ;  and  it  is  highly  prob- 
able that  it  is  the  same  whereby  he  obtained  his  six  all  different 
yet  all  true  translations  of  Dighton  Rock.  It  is  in  a  similar 
manner  that  the  discoverers  of  the  various  ciphers  which  prove 
that  Bacon  was  the  author  of  the  works  of  Shakespeare  and  of 
other  writers  have  reached  their  results.  In  a  system  of  ma- 
terials sufficiently  complex,  by  the  use  of  a  cipher  sufficiently 
elastic,  any  type  of  message  may  be  discovered.  Certainly  the 
works  of  Shakespeare  are  sufficiently  complex ;  and  I  have  been 
informed  by  one  who  has  a  profound  acquaintance  with  all  the 
ciphers,  including  some  very  recent  ones,  that  these  are  all  suf- 
ficiently elastic  to  account  for  the  results.  Exactly  the  same  can 
be  said  of  Dighton  Rock.  The  interpreters  have  worked  with 
the  drawings,  not  with  the  rock  itself.  Yet  even  these  have 
offered  a  sufficient  variety  of  figures  and  complexity  of  lines 
to  permit  the  finding  among  them  of  pictures  and  apparent 
letters  to  furnish  seeming  evidence,  by  means  of  the  methods 
alluded  to,  for  practically  any  theory  that  any  one  may  have  the 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  OBSERVATIONS  301 

ingenuity  to  devise.  This  does  not  imply  that  all  theories  must 
necessarily  be  equally  worthless,  but  rather  that  we  must  use 
scientific  methods,  and  not  methods  analogous  to  notarikon  or 
Baconian  ciphers,  in  reaching  them. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

CONCLUSIONS 

Narragansett  Bay  was  once  the  centre  of  considerable  ac- 
tivity in  rock-carving.  The  distribution  about  the  Bay  and 
vicinity  of  the  various  rocks  and  stones  that  have  been  dis- 
cussed is  indicated  in  the  map  of  Figure  108.  In  two  or  three 
other  places  in  interior  New  England  there  were  scattered  ex- 
amples of  such  work ;  and  again,  about  Machias  Bay  near  the 
northeasterly  extremity  of  the  Maine  coast,  there  was  a  second 
centre  of  similar  activities.  Anticipating  our  conclusions  as  to 
the  approximate  periods  in  which  such  work  was  executed,  we 
may  classify  the  examples  of  it  that  we  have  found,  in  the  fol- 
lowing manner : 

A.  Dighton  Rock,  on  Assonet  Neck,  the  earliest  one  to  receive 
inscriptions,  containing  records  made  first  probably  by  sixteenth 
and  seventeenth  century  whites,  and  later  by  Colonial  Indians. 

B.  Other  rocks,  ledges,  stones,  and  trees,  with  records  by 
Colonial  Indians — Mark  Rock,  Tiverton,  Portsmouth;  probably 
also  Swansea,  Fogland  Ferry,  West  Wrentham,  Long  Island,  the 
Warren  Bannerstone,  and,  in  part  at  least,  the  Arnold's  Point 
Cup  Stone,  in  the  Narragansett  area ;  Scaticook  in  Connecticut ; 
West  River  and  Bellows  Falls  in  Vermont ;  a  tree  in  Vermont  and 
two  in  New  Hampshire;  Clark's  Point,  Birch  Point  and  Hog 
Island  in  the  region  of  Machias  Bay  in  Maine ; — nineteen  localities 
in  all  in  A  and  B,  with  some  doubt  as  to  the  existence  or  character 
of  three  of  them, 

C.  Rocks  with  unintentional  Indian  markings,  resulting  from 
their  operations  of  grinding  tools  and  grain — Purgatory;  possibly 
King's  Rocks. 

D.  Later  inscriptions,  not  fraudulent,  but  doubtful  whether  by 
Indians  or  whites — Dighton  headstone,  Denison  tablet ;  possibly 
Arnold's  Point  Cup  Stone  in  part. 

E.  Early  eighteenth  century  inscriptions  by  a  white  man — 
Newport. 

302 


t.VlV' 


£,„  :^f 


;x:7 


-r^v^<^^  v^w=^:^. 


.  ,x  i  -■' 


Fig.    lOS.       Map    showing   approximate    locations   of    inscribed    rocks   and 
stones  of  the  Narragansctt  Basin 


Facing  page  302 


i 


CONCLUSIONS  303 

F.  Late  Indian,  nineteenth  century — Mount  Hope. 

G.  Cases  of  deliberate  fraud  (Taunton  tablet)  ;  and  more  than 
twenty  of  mistaken  rumor  and  misinterpretation  of  natural  mark- 
ings. 

The  great  majority  of  the  inscriptions  were  made  by  the 
aboriginal  Indians,  most  of  them  surely  in  colonial  times,  al- 
though it  is  possible  that  a  few  beginnings  had  been  made 
earlier,  during  the  period  of  exploration  and  early  fishery.  If 
we  include  the  Arnold's  Point  rock  as  of  partly  Indian  work- 
manship, then  there  were  four  important  localities  about  Nar- 
ragansett  Bay,  and  probably  five  or  six  others  of  less  conse- 
quence, at  which  Colonial  Indians  engaged  in  rock-carving 
activities.  I  have  not  personally  studied  the  petroglyphs  about 
Machias  Bay;  yet,  so  far  as  they  have  been  described,  there 
does  not  seem  to  be  any  reason  to  believe  that  they  would  jus- 
tify conclusions  different  from  those  that  are  arrived  at  for  the 
rest  of  New  England.  I  exclude  from  consideration  such 
small  stones  and  implements  as  are  incised  with  purely  deco- 
rative designs,  of  which  I  have  seen  a  few  examples  in  New 
England  museums,  and  have  had  occasion  to  discuss  a  few  in 
these  pages.  With  these  reservations,  it  has  become  evident 
that  the  regions  about  Narragansett  Bay  and  Machias  Bay  were 
the  only  noteworthy  centres  of  petroglyphic  work  in  New  Eng- 
land. Nothing  of  like  character  and  of  any  importance  occurs 
nearer  than  Pennsylvania  and  Ohio  on  the  one  side,  and 
Nova  Scotia  on  the  other.  Most  of  the  alleged  instances  else- 
where that  we  have  examined  have  either  been  proven  erroneous 
or  have  lacked  confirmation.  Scaticook  in  Connecticut  may  be 
one  additional  example,  and  the  Connecticut  Valley  in  Vermont 
is  certainly  another;  but  their  inscribed  records  are  few  and 
trivial. 

This  fact  gives  rather  strong  support  to  a  conclusion  at 
which  we  have  arrived  from  a  study  of  the  rocks  themselves, 
namely,  that  the  making  of  rock-inscriptions  did  not  arise  in 
New  England  from  a  spontaneous  impulse  and  native  practice 
of  the  aboriginal  inhabitants,  but  was  imitative,  and  due  to  the 
example  of  Europeans.    No  one  of  our  reasons  is  entirely  con- 


304  DIGHTON  ROCK 

elusive,  but  they  all  seem  to  point  in  the  same  direction.  There 
are  several  of  these  reasons.  The  first  is  the  one  just  given, 
**that  nowhere  in  New  England  except  around  Narragansett 
Bay  and  near  Nova  Scotia  was  there  any  appreciable  carving 
on  stone.  A  second  is,  that  the  testimony  of  early  observers 
asserts  that  the  New  England  Indians,  unlike  some  of  the 
Delaware  stock  from  which  they  derived,  had  no  historical 
sense,  no  interest  in  their  ancestors,  and  no  records  of  any 
sort.  If,  before  the  coming  of  Europeans,  they  had  known 
anything  at  all  about  the  possibility  of  communication  and  of 
making  records  by  means  of  picture-writings,  one  would  nat- 
urally expect  to  find  some  mention  of  the  fact  in  the  writings 
of  the  explorers  and  colonists  who  first  came  into  contact  with 
them  and  studied  their  customs.  I  am  unable  to  discover  a 
single  suggestion  of  the  sort.  On  the  contrary,  such  early 
evidence  as  I  can  find,  which  has  been  quoted  in  our  introduc- 
tory chapter,  seems  to  imply  the  entire  absence  of  any  idea  of 
communication  by  written  signs,  even  pictographic  ones. 
Henry  E.  Chase,  therefore,  appears  to  be  correct  when,  in  his 
Notes  on  the  Wampanoags,  he  remarks  upon  the  fact  that 
among  these  Indians  we  find  "not  a  trace  of  any  attempt, 
before  their  contact  with  the  whites,  to  convey  to  later  genera- 
tions an  idea,  either  historical  or  otherwise,  in  a  form  likely  to 
last."  So  also,  it  would  seem,  was  J.  A.  Goodwin,  who,  in  his 
Pilgrim  Republic,  says  of  the  New  England  Indians  that  they 
had  no  relics  and  memorials,  no  traditions  and  legendary  songs, 
and  that  even  the  intelligent  Massasoit  knew  nothing  of  his 
immediate  predecessors.  In  the  third  place,  the  evidence  from 
the  rocks  seems  to  show  that  the  Indian  inscriptions  were  made 
after  the  arrival  of  white  men.  The  early  white  records. on 
Dighton  Rock,  from  1511  to  1640,  occupy  a  prominent  posi- 
tion and  do  not  seem  to  have  been  hampered  by  the  previous 
presence  of  Indian  writings;  some  of  the  Indian  pictographs 
(Mark  Rock,  Tiverton)  may  possibly  have  represented  colonial 
soldiers,  and  others  may  plausibly  be  regarded  as  Indian  signa- 
tures of  colonial  times ;  the  Mount  Hope  inscription  was  almost 
surely  made  as  late  as  1834.    Still  further,  the  only  instances  of 


4 


CONCLUSIONS  305 

real  picture-writing  whose  date  is  definitely  known — those  of 
the  Dighton  headstone  and  of  the  tree  at  Weathersfield — were 
executed  not  far  from  1700;  and  this  is  one  reason  why  the 
only  other  instances  that  have  been  reported,  the  Warren 
bannerstone,  the  Long  Island  tablet,  and  the  trees  in  New 
Hampshire,  may  be  regarded  as  most  likely  to  have  been  also 
of  relatively  late  date.  Moreover,  it  seems  to  have  been  known 
to  the  colonists  that  the  Indians  of  their  time  made  engravings 
upon  rocks;  for  Isaac  Greenwood,  near  the  close  of  his  letter 
of  1730,  speaks  of  certain  unnamed  "sculptures,  probably  the 
work  of  some  modern  Indians."  Similarly,  Squier  says  that 
some  petroglyphs  "are  known  to  have  been  inscribed  by  the 
existing  Indian  tribes,  since  the  period  of  the  commencement 
of  European  influence."  Finally,  there  is  a  suggestion  of  sig- 
nificance in  the  fact  that  the  only  important  centres  of  rock- 
carving  in  New  England  were  centres  of  Pilgrim  influence — 
Narragansett  Bay  was  in  home  territory,  and  they  had  a  trading 
post  in  Machias  in  1633.  Another  curious  and  perhaps  signifi- 
cant fact  is  that  at  least  two  of  the  localities — Tiverton  and  the 
Connecticut  Valley — were  places  where  Indians  gathered,  under 
conditions  of  unusual  excitement  with  long  periods  of  idleness 
during  King  Philip's  War.  One  of  the  infallible  detectives  of 
fiction  whose  identity  I  have  forgotten  is  made  by  his  creator 
to  remark :  "Once  is  a  happening ;  twice  is  a  coincidence ;  three 
times  is  a  certainty."  We  have  found  six  reasons  for  believing 
that  Indians  in  New  England  owed  to  white  influence  their 
habit  of  making  carvings  on  rocks,  and  perhaps  even  the  first 
suggestion  of  the  use  of  pictographs.  Each  is  incomplete  in 
itself,  but  all  together  they  are  almost  compelling  in  their 
cumulative  indications.  The  probabilities  point  to  a  period 
around  1640  as  that  of  scribblings,  pictures,  and  perhaps 
records  of  individual  names  and  adventures,  on  rocks ;  and  to  a 
period  around  1675  to  1700  as  that  when  they  began  to  make 
a  few  pictographic  and  possibly  ideographic  writings. 

While  these  conclusions  can  be  accepted  as  practically  cer- 
tain so  far  as  records  on  rocks  and  other  enduring  materials 
are  concerned,  yet  the  absence  of  present  evidence  does  not 


306  DIGHTON  ROCK 

make  it  entirely  sure  that  pictographs  may  not  have  been  made, 
as  Schoolcraft  thinks  they  were,  "early  and  generally  among 
all  our  principal  tribes,  ...  on  sheets  of  bark,  painted  skins, 
tabular  sticks  of  wood  or  the  decorticated  sides  of  trees,  where 
they  were  read  by  one  or  two  generations,  and  then  perished."^ 
Mallery,  also,  calls  attention  to  evanescent  forms  of  picto- 
graphic  work,  and  remarks  that  "there  may  thus  have  occurred 
much  more  of  such  activity  than  is  evidenced  by  the  still  extant 
petroglyphs."  He  secured,  for  example,  "a  valuable  collection 
of  birch-bark  pictographs  immemorially  and  still  made  by  the 
Passamaquoddy  and  Penobscot  tribes  of  Abnaki  in  Maine, 
showing  a  similarity  in  the  use  of  picture-writing  between  the 
members  of  the  widespread  Algonquian  stock  in  the  regions 
west  of  the  great  lakes  and  those  on  the  northeastern  sea- 
board."^ This  fact,  he  says,  had  been  inferentially  asserted, 
but  no  satisfactory  evidence  of  it  had  been  presented,  before 
his  own  researches  were  undertaken  in  1887  and  1888.  An 
"immemorial  use"  of  pictography  for  which  no  evidence  is 
submitted  before  1888  need  not  have  really  existed  for  a  very 
long  time  before  that  date,  as  our  own  observations  in  regard 
to  the  use  of  similar  phrases  in  connection  with  the  Dighton 
and  Mount  Hope  rocks  clearly  shows.  Probably  the  actual 
facts  are  not  very  different  from  those  which  we  know,  on 
abundant  early  evidence,  were  true  in  the  case  of  the  Micmac 
tribe  of  the  Abnakis.  Of  their  method  of  writing,  Vetromile 
asserts  that  already,  in  native  hands,  when  the  French  first  ar- 
rived in  Acadia,  it  had  become  a  highly  elaborated  system, 
capable  of  expressing  every  idea  and  shade  of  meaning,  and 
that  it  was  in  regular  use  for  communication.  But  this  is  an 
example  of  extreme  exaggeration  founded  upon  a  slim  basis  of 
fact.  The  natives  did  use  some  simple  mnemonic  marks  of 
their  own  devising  as  aids  to  memory.  The  most  complete  and 
reliable  account  of  this  practice,  and  its  elaboration  by  mission- 
aries into  a  complex  ideographic  system,  is  given  by  William 
F.  Ganong  in  his  "Introduction"  to  Le  Clercq's  New  Relation 
of  Gaspesia,  published  in  1910.     Its  degree  of  development  as 

^Indian  Tribes,  1851,  i.  414. 

2  Tenth  Annual  Report,  B.  A.  E,  201. 


CONCLUSIONS  307 

a  purely  native  product  is  well  indicated  by  the  statement  of 
Father  Drouillette  in  1651-52  :  "Some  would  write  their  lessons 
after  a  fashion  of  their  own,  using  a  bit  of  charcoal  for  a  pen, 
and  a  piece  of  bark  instead  of  paper.  Their  characters  were 
new,  and  so  peculiar  that  one  could  not  recognize  or  under- 
stand the  writing  of  another, — that  is  to  say,  they  used  certain 
signs  corresponding  to  their  ideas ;  as  it  were,  a  local  reminder, 
for  recalling  points  and  articles  and  maxims  which  they  had 
retained."  In  other  words,  it  was  not  true  picture-writing,  with 
symbols  to  which  fixed  meanings  were  attached,  understood 
alike  by  all  who  learned  to  read,  but  was  mnemonic,  individual 
and  variable.  Ganong  thinks  that  "it  is  possible  the  Indians 
had  some  which  were  understood  by  them  all,  though  of  this 
we  have  no  definite  knowledge,"  and,  if  there  were  any,  "these 
must  have  been  extremely  few."  But  there  is  clearly  no  evi- 
dence, and,  I  think,  in  view  of  all  the  facts  that  we  have  as- 
sembled, no  likelihood  that  they  used  a  single  character  of  fixed 
meaning.  All  was  as  purely  mnemonic  as  is  a  string  tied  round 
a  finger  or  a  knot  tied  in  a  handkerchief  to  remind  one  of  some 
idea  which  he  wishes  to  recall  on  an  appropriate  occasion.  It 
was  the  missionaries  who  developed  the  practice  into  an  elabo- 
rate ideographic  system.  Men  like  Vetromile  and  Mallery,  ob- 
serving late  forms  highly  developed  under  white  influence,  seem 
to  have  assumed  without  warrant  that  these  had  existed  "im- 
memorially,"  and  were  of  native  devising. 

There  is,  then,  no  discoverable  indication  that  the  abo- 
riginal tribes  in  New  England  made  true  pictographs  of  any 
kind,  unless  the  designs  on  a  number  of  small  stones  and  other 
objects  of  uncertain  date  may  have  been  pre-white  and  may 
properly  be  classed  as  pictographs.  They  do  not  seem  to  in- 
clude any  true  symbolic  picture-writing,  however,  but  only  dec- 
orative, pictorial  and  perhaps  mnemonic  devices.  On  the 
whole,  for  the  many  reasons  given,  I  am  inclined  to  believe 
that  they  knew  nothing  of  the  pictographic  art. 

The  worn  appearance  of  the  inscriptions,  with  the  conse- 
quent difficulty  in  decipheriing  them,  their  appearance  of  great 
age,  the  mistaken  belief  that  the  rock  surfaces  wear  away 
rapidly  and  that  the  lines  drawn  upon  them  become  distinctly 


308  DIGHTON  ROCK 

less  legible  within  the  period  of  a  lifetime,  cannot  be  used  as  a 
criterion  of  antiquity,  great  or  little.  In  my  earlier  chapters  I 
have  frequently  shown  evidence  that  the  inscriptions  are  today 
as  easily  and  accurately  discernible  as  they  were  when  the  first 
description  of  the  appearance  of  any  of  them  was  given,  two 
hundred  years  ago.  In  fact,  our  recent  flashlight  photographs 
reveal  more  today  than  direct  observation  of  the  rocks  has  ever 
done,  from  the  very  first.  We  have  also  seen  that  marks  made 
provably  since  1700,  such  as  Stiles's  "I  HOWOO,"  and  the 
names  and  initials  of  white  men,  often  look  as  faint  and  un- 
certain as  do  the  earlier  carvings.  When  shallow  lines,  such 
as  are  most  of  those  of  the  inscriptions,  are  first  made  upon 
these  rocks,  they  at  first  stand  out  clear  and  certain,  of  a  lighter 
coloring  than  the  natural  rock-surface.  But  it  does  not  take 
many  years  of  weathering,  varying  with  exposure  to  storm  and 
ice  and  with  the  length  of  their  daily  covering  by  the  tide,  be- 
fore their  color  merges  into  that  of  the  rock  and  their  outlines 
become  blurred.  Thereafter  they  look  very  old,  and  cannot 
with  certainty  be  distinguished  from  natural  striae,  cracks  and 
pittings;  and  many  of  the  shallowest  of  them,  satisfactorily 
visible  when  first  made,  disappear  altogether.  On  the  other 
hand,  these  rock-surfaces  do  not  wear  rapidly.  The  frequently 
expressed  opinion  that  they  do  is  a  natural  but  mistaken  psy- 
chological impression,  and  the  worn  appearance  of  their  carv- 
ings is  compatible  with  any  actual  age,  remote  or  recent. 

One  fact  of  interest  concerning  almost  all  of  these  rocks 
is  that  they  are  submerged  at  high  tide,  with  the  exception 
formerly  of  the  one  at  Mount  Hope.  Various  opinions  have 
been  expressed  as  to  the  reason  for  such  a  position.  The  one 
that  appeals  to  me  is  that  all  of  the  localities  where  they  are 
situated  were  probably  not  far  from  Indian  villages  or  en- 
campments, and  were  places  where  Indians  gathered  in  con- 
siderable numbers  at  low  tide  for  digging  clams,  darting  fish, 
drawing  fish-nets,  and  for  incidental  bathing  and  social  pleas- 
ures. Some  of  the  more  idle  of  them,  after  the  idea  had  been 
suggested  by  the  practices  of  white  men,  amused  themselves 
and  others  by  making  these  pictures  and  haphazard  lines.  The 
same  impulse,  in  the  opinion  of  Kendall,  was  responsible  for 


CONCLUSIONS  309 

the  carvings  in  Vermont — "the  work  of  idle  hours,"  "the  whim 
of  vacant  moments,"  at  a  fishing  or  duck-hunting  resort;  and 
Hkewise,  according  to  W.  J.  Holland,  for  certain  petroglyphs  in 
Pennsylvania,  which  "speak  of  an  idle  hour  and  the  outgoing 
of  the  pictorial  instinct  which  exists  in  all  men,"  and  which 
were  executed,  he  thinks,  by  "lazy  Indians,  engaged  in  fishing 
and  hunting,  and  amusing  themselves  by  depicting  things  on 
the  smooth  surface  of  the  stone."  As  early  as  1779,  the  Mar- 
quis de  Marbois  recorded  his  belief  that,  if  not  a  trophy  of 
victory  of  some  native  tribe,  the  inscription  was  "perhaps  the 
pastime  of  some  idle  Indians,  more  ingenious  and  less  lazy  than 
the  rest."  Richard  Andree  also  expresses  the  belief  that  "petro- 
glyphs are  usually  made  for  mere  pastime."  He  excepts  those 
of  America,  but  unnecessarily,  it  would  seem,  for  those  of 
New  England  at  least.  Very  recently,  J.  W.  Fewkes  has  added 
his  authority  in  support  of  a  similar  opinion,  saying  that  In- 
dian rock-carvings  are  usually  "little  more  than  idle  markings 
by  one  or  more  individuals,  and  there  is  little  likelihood  that 
anyone  except  the  Indian  or  Indians  who  etched  them  could 
tell  of  their  significance." 

In  thus  advocating  a  trivial  origin  and  a  consequent  lack 
of  important  significance  for  these  pictographs,  we  are  at  vari- 
ance with  the  beliefs  of  many  eminent  archaeologists.  Brinton, 
Mallery,  Henshaw  and  others  refuse  to  believe  that,  with  rare 
exceptions,  Indian  pictographs  can  be  "idle  scrawls,"  and  as- 
sert that  "significance  is  an  essential  element  of  them."  Most 
of  those  who  have  attempted  to  interpret  the  records  on 
Dighton  Rock  have  taken  all  of  its  carvings  as  forming  to- 
gether one  connected  story.  In  this  they  are  certainly  wrong. 
The  most  plausible  interpretations  of  the  designs  upon  this 
rock,  and  the  scattered  and  unconnected  positions  of  the  draw- 
ings on  Mark  Rock,  at  Machias,  and  on  the  rocks  in  Vermont, 
are  a  convincing  testimony  that  they  were  made  at  various 
times  by  many  individuals.  With  the  disappearance  of  any 
possibility  of  connected  meaning  that  can  be  assigned  plausibly 
to  the  whole  collection  of  glyphs  upon  any  one  rock,— except 
for  that  near  Mount  Hope  and  some  of  the  smaller  stones, — it 
remains  only  to  examine  the  individual  designs  to  determine 


310  DIGHTON  ROCK 

whether  or  not  they  constitute  important  records.  The  answer 
to  this  question  seems  to  be  unmistakable.  We  have  repeatedly 
seen  reason  to  believe  that  some  of  the  markings  are  indeed 
mere  "idle  scrawls,"  childish  and  haphazard  scribblings,  the 
outcome  merely  of  an  impulse  to  be  doing  something,  and  per- 
haps to  attract  attention  from  idle  and  admiring  companions. 
The  forms  adopted  at  first  might  very  naturally  have  been 
crude  attempts  at  imitation  of  the  magically  working  writings 
of  white  men,  with  no  more  actual  resemblance  to  them  than 
is  attained  by  a  little  child  who  first  essays  a  like  enterprise. 
These  primitive  scrawls  easily  merge  into  ornamental  and  pic- 
torial designs,  without  symbolic  significance,  made  for  similar 
reasons  and  likely  to  arouse  a  larger  degree  of  immediate  ad- 
miration. We  have  seen  upon  our  rocks  a  number  of  designs 
that  are  clearly  decorative ;  and  there  are  a  great  many  pictures 
representing  definite  and  recognizable  objects  but  without  prob- 
able further  significance:  human  beings,  deer,  turtle,  on  Nar- 
ragansett  rocks,  also  various  other  animals  in  Vermont  and  at 
Machias.  The  next  natural  step  is  an  easy  one :  the  delineating 
of  forms  that  may  have  been  "mnemonic,"  or  have  had  some 
significance  other  than  decorative  or  pictorial  to  those  who 
made  them,  but  one  that  could  not  possibly  be  more  than 
guessed  at  by  anyone  else  to  whom  they  were  not  explained. 
The  most  probable  instances,  and  perhaps  the  only  ones  in  our 
area,  seem  to  be  the  designs  composed  of  triangles  on  Dighton 
Rock,  the  glyphs  in  position  i  on  Mark  Rock,  and  some  of  the 
pictures  at  Machias.  Some  of  the  latter  suggest  the  possibility 
that  they  may  have  been  portrayals  of  individual  adventures 
in  hunting  or  the  like.  Of  similar  character  would  be  the  few 
probable,  or  at  least  possible,  signatures  of  individuals  at  Mark 
Rock.  Until  we  come  to  the  smaller  stones  of  probably  later 
date  and  to  the  Mount  Hope  rock,  this  is  all  that  the  Indian 
inscriptions  of  this  region  contain,  so  far  as  we  can  be  sure 
and  so  far  as  is  at  all  probable.  There  is  not  a  single  readable, 
or  even  identifiable,  instance  of  a  collection  of  pictographic  or 
ideographic  devices  that  would  have  been  at  all  likely  to  pos- 
sess a  generally  accepted  and  interpretable  symbolic  character. 
The  conclusion  seems  to  be  justified  that  in  New  England,  at 


CONCLUSIONS  311 

least,  the  Indian  carvings  on  rocks  were  truly  some  of  them 
meaningless  scrawls,  ornamental  designs,  and  pictures,  and 
that  none  of  them  possessed  any  further  meaning  that  was  im- 
portant or  discoverable  by  anyone  except  the  maker  of  them. 
Their  execution  was  a  pastime  of  idle  and  social  leisure,  was 
suggested  by  similar,  though  purposeful,  activities  of  white 
men,  and  was  due  to  no  higher  psychological  impulses  than  the 
urge  to  be  doing  something  interesting  and  the  desire  for  at- 
tracting attention.  Some  of  the  small  stones,  such  as  those 
from  Warren  and  Long  Island,  seem  to  contain  truly  symbolic 
writings;  but,  if  the  above  conclusions  are  justified,  this  fact 
would  strengthen  our  already  formed  suspicion  that  all  such  are 
of  later  date.  Algonkian  Indians  made  pictographic  writings 
elsewhere;  but,  so  far  as  we  have  present  evidence,  this  prac- 
tice did  not  arise  in  New  England  until  after  European  influ- 
ence had  been  felt,  and  then  only  to  a  small  extent. 

Summing  up  the  whole  matter  briefly,  we  have  found  three 
centres  in  New  England  at  which  aboriginal  rock-carving  oc- 
curred. By  far  the  most  important  of  these  was  the  region 
about  Narragansett  Bay,  where  such  work  was  done  in  fifteen 
to  twenty  separate  localities.  Less  extensive,  yet  still  consid- 
erable, similar  activity  took  place  in  three  localities  about 
Machias  Bay  in  Maine.  A  very  small  amount  of  it  was  done 
at  two  places  in  the  lower  Connecticut  Valley  in  Vermont. 
Concerning  the  time,  circumstances  and  significance  of  the  in- 
scriptions, we  have  arrived  at  certain  conclusions  that  appear 
highly  probable,  but  that,  from  the  very  nature  of  the  case,  are 
not  susceptible  of  absolute  proof.  The  rocks  themselves  are 
too  worn,  the  markings  on  them  frequently  too  obscure,  the 
known  historical  facts  too  meagre,  to  permit  full  certitude. 
Yet  not  only  have  they  seemed  the  ones  best  justified  in  each 
individual  case,  but  taken  together  they  form  a  consistent  and 
unified  picture  of  petroglyphic  activities  in  New  England. 
With  these  reservations,  we  may  accept  the  following  as  an 
approximately  correct  account  of  the  sequence  of  events.  The 
first  rock-record  in  New  England  appears  to  have  been  made 
by  Miguel  Cortereal  in  1511,  evidently  for  the  purpose  of  at- 
tracting the  attention  of  possible  explorers,  and  in  it  he  stated 


312  DIGHTON  ROCK 

that  he  was  leader  of  the  local  Indians.  It  is  fairly  probable 
that  a  fisherman  named  Thacher  made  the  second  record  on 
Dighton  Rock  in  1592,  and  that  haymakers  from  Taunton 
v/rote  on  it  directions  for  finding  a  spring,  about  1640,  After 
some  or  all  of  these  were  made,  Indians  followed  with  numer- 
ous carvings  on  rocks  and  stones  in  the  Narragansett  and 
Machias  regions,  but  very  rarely  elsewhere  in  New  England. 
Their  designs  were  trivial  scribblings  and  pictures,  made  only 
for  pastime  and  attendant  admiration  of  their  companions,  in 
crude  imitation  of  what  they  had  seen  done  by  white  men.  For 
the  most  part  they  had  no  significance  at  all,  although  in  a  few 
cases  it  seems  likely  that  they  may  have  had  something  more 
than  merely  pictorial  meaning  to  the  individual  who  made 
them,  not  discoverable  by  anyone  else  unless  he  explained  it. 
Later,  perhaps  toward  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century,  a 
very  few  small  stones  and  trees  began  to  be  inscribed  with 
truly  symbolic  writings.  We  know  of  only  four  examples  in 
which  the  writing  was  pictographic,  and  one  in  which  it  appears 
to  have  been  ideographic.  The  last  record  of  all  fittingly  closes 
the  series.  It  was  made  probably  as  late  as  1834,  by  a  half- 
breed  Cherokee  who  had  married  a  descendant  of  the  Wam- 
panoag  chiefs,  and  was  written  in  Cherokee  symbols  as  a  trib- 
ute to  the  man  whose  great  personality  and  sad  fate  aptly 
typified  the  tragical  history  of  his  race:  Metacomet,  Chief 
Sachem. 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES 

Nothing  affords  clearer  evidence  of  the  depth  of  interest 
that  has  been  taken  for  so  long  a  time  in  the  subject  to  which 
this  study  has  been  devoted  than  a  survey  of  the  extensive  liter- 
ature that  has  discussed  it.  It  has  seemed  worth  while  to  make 
such  a  survey  particularly  complete  and  impressive  for  the 
one  rock  that  is  most  famous  of  them  all,  and  to  compile  sepa- 
rately a  Mst  of  only  the  more  important  of  the  references  to  the 
other  petroglyphs. 

The  Bibliography  of  Dighton  Rock  aims  to  record  all  cases 
of  mention  as  well  as  of  discussion  of  Dighton  Rock  that  have 
come  to  the  writer's  attention,  with  the  exception  of  very  recent 
newspaper  notices.  In  1926,  seven  years  after  my  first  an- 
nouncement of  the  Cortereal  theory,  reviews  of  it  were  pub- 
lished by  Free,  by  Hough,  by  Lord,  and  in  the  New  York 
Times  Mid- Week  Pictorial.  Since  then,  there  have  been  in- 
numerable newspaper  articles.  Associated  Press  despatches,  and 
editorials,  in  the  press  of  nearly  all  countries,  and  especially 
lengthy  ones  in  Portuguese  publications;  and  these  are  not 
recorded  in  the  Bibliography.  It  includes  not  only  printed 
sources,  but  letters,  manuscripts,  drawings  and  photographs, 
and  occasionally  incidents  of  importance.  A  very  few  cases  are 
included  where  the  rock  itself  is  not  directly  mentioned,  but 
where  judgment  concerning  it  is  implied  in  such  statements  as 
that  Rafn's  conclusions  are  to  be  fully  trusted,  or  that  there  are 
no  discoverable  vestiges  of  the  early  Norse  visits.  Page  refer- 
ences are  usually  not  to  the  entire  discussion  named  in  the 
title,  but  only  to  the  portion  dealing  with  the  rock.  Whenever 
representations  of  the  appearance  of  the  inscription  accompany 
a  discussion,  the  fact  is  noted  by  insertion  of  the  abbreviation 
"Illus.,"  followed  by  a  number  which  is  that  of  some  drawing 
or  photograph  so  numbered  in  the  list  of  reproductions  given  in 
Chapter  IX.    A  brief  comment  is  attached  to  each  item,  which 

315 


316  DIGHTON  ROCK 

rarely  attempts  to  indicate  the  value  or  the  entire  contents  of 
the  source,  but  confines  itself  usually  to  stating  the  opinion  ex- 
pressed as  to  the  origin  of  the  inscription.  Titles  are  given 
with  brevity,  and  as  a  rule  the  date  of  first  publication  only  is 
given. 

Inclusion  in  the  list  is  naturally  no  indication  as  to  the 
value  of  a  paper.  A  large  proportion  of  the  papers  never  pos- 
sessed any  merit  as  serious  or  reliable  statements  of  fact  or  dis- 
cussions of  the  problem,  yet  even  these  may  have  psychological 
or  historical  significance.  Many  trivial  instances  of  casual 
mention  of  the  rock  are  included,  for  they  serve  at  least  as 
indications  of  the  degree  of  interest  aroused  by  the  inscription 
and  of  importance  attached  to  it.  It  is  inevitable  that  many 
references  to  the  rock  must  have  been  overlooked,  and  the  com- 
piler of  the  bibliography  earnestly  hopes  that  readers  knowing 
of  possible  additions  to  it  will  kindly  call  them  to  his  attention. 

The  second  Bibliography,  which  is  merely  a  repetition  of 
the  numbers  of  the  first  one  arranged  in  chronological  order, 
is  a  striking  evidence  of  the  continuity  of  interest  in  the  subject 
through  a  long  period  of  years.  It  includes  69  items  belonging 
to  31  years  out  of  the  120  between  1680  and  1799;  55  items  in 

24  years  of  the  Z7  between  1800  and  1836.  Since  then  not  a 
year  has  passed  without  some  reference  to  the  rock,  and  usu- 
ally many;  so  that  we  have  found  184  items  in  the  next  35 
years,  to  1871 ;  175  items  in  29  years,  to  1900;  and  113  items  in 

25  years,  to  1925. 

The  third  Bibliography,  of  the  subject  in  general,  does  not 
attempt  to  be  exhaustive.  Many  of  the  papers  enumerated 
under  Dighton  Rock  discuss  other  inscribed  rocks  also,  and 
their  titles  are  not  usually  repeated  in  this  section.  The  aim  has 
been  to  include  only  the  most  important  of  the  additional 
sources,  and  also  such  discussions  as  contribute  to  the  solution 
of  our  problems  even  if  they  make  no  direct  mention  of  New 
England  petroglyphs. 


A.  BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  DIGHTON  ROCK 

1  Aall,  J.  Snorre  Sturlesons  Norske  Kongers  Sagaer,  1839,  ii.  216  f. 
Illus.,  14e,  17b,  18b.  — Norse;  follows  Rafn. 

2  Abbott,  J.  S.  C.  History  of  Maine,  1875,  pp.  13-21.  —  No  direct  mention 
of  Rock;  but  Newport  Tower  is  Norse,  and  Rafn's  authority  unquestionable. 

3  Abbott,  K.  M.  Old  Paths  and  Legends  of  N.  Eng.,  1904,  p.  388.  Illus., 
29c,  p.  349.  —  Mention. 

4  Adams,  Geo.,  publisher.  Bristol  County  Almanac  for  1852,  pp.  31  f. 
—  Mention. 

5  Adet,  p.  a.     Probable  visit  to  Rock,  1796.     See  no.  550. 

6  Amer.  Architect  and  Building  News,  Feb.  8,  1890,  xxvii.  93.  (Re- 
print from  New  York  Times.)  —  May  be  Norse.  Ownership  and  some 
theories ;  many  misstatements. 

7  Amer.  Ethnological  Sec,  Transactions,  1845,  vol.  i.  p.  xi.  —  Men- 
tion of  paper  by   Schoolcraft  giving  Chingwauk's  reading. 

8  Amer.  Monthly  Mag.  and  Critical  Rev.,  1817,  i.  257.  —  Review  of 
Mathieu's  Le  Printemps,  probably  by  S.  L.  Mitchill. 

9  Amer.  Monthly  Mag.,  1836,  N.  S.,  i.  315  n.  —  Another  stone,  work 
of  insane  man,  resembling  Rock. 

10  Amer.  Standard,  Apr.  15,  1924,  i.  18.  —  Accepts  Rock  as  Norse  on 
authority  of  Anderson,  and  Skeleton  and  Tower  on  that  of  Longfellow. 

11  Amer.  Whig  (Taunton,  Mass.),  March  14,  1850,  p.  2,  col.  4.  The 
Dighton  Rock  Hieroglyphics ;  a  new  theory.  —  Buried  treasure,  probably 
left  by  Northmen. 

12  Americana,  The,    [1912],  vii.   article   Dighton   Rock.  —  Indian. 

13  Anderson,  R.  B.  America  not  discovered  by  Columbus,  1874.  4th 
ed.,  1891 ;  editions  in  Danish  and  German.  2nd  ed.,  1877,  pp.  21  ff,  29  ff, 
82  ff.  —  Norse.  Accepts  Rafn's  conclusions.  Not  a  reliable  source  concern- 
ing the  Rock:  "too  credulous"  (Slafter,  1877)  ;  "shows  tendency  of  his  race 
to  a  facility  rather  than  felicity  in  accepting  evidence"  (Winsor)  ;  "such  a 
mass  of  unbelievable  assumptions  and  of  unsupported  conclusions  are  rarely 
found  together  in  so  few  pages"   (Ruge). 

14  Anderson,  R.  B.,  editor.  Norse  Discovery  of  America.  Transla- 
tions and  deductions  by  A.  M.  Reeves,  N.  L.  Beamish,  R.  B.  Anderson. 
Published  by  the  Norraena  Society,  1907.  —  Anderson's  contribution  to  this 
volume  does  not  mention  the  Rock ;  but  he  is  "hospitably  disposed  to  the 
basin  of  Charles  River  as  the  site  of  Vinland"   (p.  312).       See  Beamish. 

15  Anderson,  Robert  E.  Story  of  the  Extinct  Civilizations  of  the 
West,  1904,  p.  28.    Illus.,  after  nos.  17b,  15c.  —  Supposed  to  be  Norse. 

16  Andree,  R.  Ethnographische  Parallelen  und  Vergleiche,  1878,  i.  294- 

317 


318  DIGHTON  ROCK 

297.  Illus.,  Tafel  V,  Fig.  50,  after  Schoolcraft's  14e+18b.— "A  very  ordi- 
nary Indian  petroglyph." 

17  Andrews,  C.  M.,  and  Davenport,  F.  G.  Guide  to  the  Manuscript 
Material  for  the  History  of  the  U.  S.  to  1783  in  the  British  Museum,  1908, 
p.  IZ.  —  Reference  to  Greenwood  letter. 

18  Andrews,  E.  B.  History  of  the  U.  S.,  1894,  i.  2.  Illus.,  p.  39,  after 
no.  24.  —  Not  Norse. 

19  Antiquarian  (Wm.  H.  Cranston  and  H.  Tisdale).  Letters  of 
March  27,  May  16,  June  21,  1847.  First  appeared  in  newspapers  of  Provi- 
dence and  Newport ;  republished  in  Brooks's  Controversy  touching  the  Old 
Stone  Mill,  1851,  pp.  11-22,  38-44.  — A  hoax,  claiming  that  the  Rock  was 
inscribed  by  ^gypto-Drosticks. 

Antiquitates  Americans,  1837.    See  no.  439. 

20  Appleton,  T.  G.  Chairman  Northmen's  Memorial  Committee,  Pres. 
Boston  Scandinavian  Memorial  Club.  Letter  to  Arnzen,  Jan.  23,  1880, 
concerning  removal  of  Rock.     In  possession  of  Old  Col.  Hist.  Soc. 

21  Arnold,  J.  N.    The  Stone  Worshippers.     In  Narrag.  Hist.  Register, 

1888,  vi.  328.  —  Indian  record,  showing  influence  of  Atlantians  and  Druids. 
22-26  Arnzen,    N.      Letters    and   announcement    regarding   his   gift    of 

Rock  to  the  Royal  Society  of  Northern  Antiquaries  of  Copenhagen.  Meet- 
ings of  [22]  Aug.,  1861,  [23]  Sept.,  1862.  In  Proc.  Mass.  Hist.  Soc,  1862, 
v.  226  f ;  1863,  vi.  252  f.  [24]  Ms.  letter  to  J.  W.  D.  Hall,  Aug.  17,  1888, 
on  transfer  of  Rock  to  the  Scandinavian  Memorial  Club.  Owned  by  Old 
Colony   Hist.   Soc.      [25]    Rep.   of    Committee  on   Dighton   Rock,   Oct.    15, 

1889.  In  Colls.  Old  Colony  Hist.  Soc,  1895,  no.  5,  pp.  94-97.  [26]  Mis- 
cellaneous correspondence  about  Rock,  1859-1889;  in  Old  Col.  Hist.  Soc. — 
Concerning  ownership. 

27  AssALL,  F.  W.  Nachrichten  liber  die  friiheren  Einwohner  von  Nord- 
amerika  und  ihre  Denkmaler,   1827,  p.  71.  —  Indians  and  white  men. 

28  Athen^um,  The,   1903,  pt.  i.,  561.  — Indian. 

29  Automobile   Blue   Book,   1917,  ii.   318.  —  Indian  hieroglyphics. 

30  Avery,  E.  McK.  History  of  the  U.  S.  and  its  People,  1904,  i.  93-96. 
Illus.,  p.  93,  after  no.  29c.  —  Not  Norse ;  Indian. 

31  Ayscough,  S.  Catalogue  of  the  MSS  preserved  in  the  British  Mu- 
seum hitherto  undescribed,  1782,  i.  355,  450.  —  Reference  to  Greenwood 
letter, 

32-33  B.,  L.,  Jr.  [Bliss,  Leonard,  Jr.]  Review  of  Antiquitates  Ameri- 
canse.  In  Western  Messenger,  1838,  v.  230.  —  Norse;  follows  Rafn.  [33] 
Inscription  Rocks,  found  in  Mass.  and  R.  I.  In  Western  Messenger,  1838, 
vi.  81-94.  —  Norse;  follows  Rafn. 

34-35  Babcock,  W.  H.  Early  Norse  Visits  to  North  America.  Smith- 
sonian Miscel.  Colls.,  1913,  pp.  44-54,  139,  169  f.  —  Indian;  "almost  certainly 
Wampanoag  work."  Norse  probably  visited  Mount  Hope  Bay,  but  no  ma- 
terial remains  of  their  visit.  [35]  Recent  History  and  Present  Status  of 
the  Vinland  Problem.  In  Geogr.  Rev.  1921,  xi.  277,  282.  —  Same  views 
defended. 


I 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  319 

26  Bacon,  E.  M.     Narragansett  Bay,  1904,  p.  3.  —  Mention. 

37  Baldwin,  J.  D.  Ancient  America,  1872,  pp.  279-285.  —  No  direct 
mention  of  Rock;  but  quotes  a  legend  from  Danforth,  and  believes  Norse 
reached  Mount  Hope  Bay. 

38-39  Bancroft,  G.  History  of  the  U.  S.,  1840,  iii.  313.  —  Indian ;  be- 
lieves in  probability  that  Norse  knew  Labrador,  but  argues  that  there  is  no 
proof.  [39]  Letter  to  M.  Van  Buren,  June  17,  1841.  In  Proc.  Mass.  Hist. 
Soc,  1909,  xlii.  390.  —  Norse  theory  a  humbug. 

40  Bancroft,  H.  H.  Native  Races  of  the  Pacific  States  of  N.  A.,  1876, 
V.  74.  —  Mention. 

41  Bangor  Daily  Commercial,  May  21,  1897.  Illus.,  after  no.  17b.  — 
Mention. 

42-43  Barber,  J.  W.  Historical  Colls,  of  Mass.,  1839  and  later  editions, 
pp.  117-119.  Illus.,  original  drawing  no.  20.  —  Description,  mostly  after  Ken- 
dall. [43]  History  and  Antiquities  of  N.  England,  N.  York  and  N.  Jersey, 
1840,  p.  11.    Illus.,  no.  18b,  p.  12.  —  Mention. 

44  Barnum,  L.  H.  [Discovery  of  America  by  the  Northmen.]  In 
Cornell  Rev.,  1874,  i.  347,  349.  —  Value  of  Rock  to  Norse  theory  is  prob- 
lematic. 

45-48  Bartlett,  J.  R.  Member  of  Committee  of  R.  I.  Hist.,  Soc,  1834; 
artist  of  the  Sketch,  no.  17a,  and  of  the  Drawing,  no.  18a.  [46]  Observa- 
tions on  the  Progress  of  Geography  and  Ethnology.  In  Proc.  N.  Y.  Hist. 
Soc.  for  1846  (1847),  iv.  160.  Separately  printed,  1847.  —  No  alphabetic 
characters  on  Rock.  [47]  Bibliography  of  R.  I.,  1864,  p.  19.  —  Mention. 
[48]  Letter  describing  making  of  the  R.  I.  Hist.  Soc.  Drawings.  In  Proc. 
R.  I.  Hist.  Soc,  1872-73,  p.  73.  —  Indian;  not  a  record  of  any  kind;  never 
believed  it  to  be  Norse. 

49-51  Baxter,  J.  P.,  Reference  to  Rock.  In  N.  Eng.  Hist.  Gen.  Regis- 
ter, 1887,  xli.  414.  —  Mention  of  unpublished  Greenwood  letter  in  British 
Museum.  [50]  Early  Voyages  to  America.  In  Colls.  Old  Colony  Hist. 
Soc,  1889,  no.  4,  pp.  4-49.  Illus.,  after  no.  29c,  p.  15.  Published  also  by 
R.  I.  Hist.  Soc,  1889.  —  Norse.  [51]  Present  status  of  pre-Columbian  dis- 
covery of  America  by  the  Northmen.  In  Ann.  Rep.  Amer.  Hist.  Associa- 
tion  for   1893,  pp.  101-110. —  Indian;  not   Norse 

52  Baylies,  Francis.  Hist.  Memoir  of  the  Colony  of  New  Plymouth, 
1830,  i.  31-33.  For  later  ed.,  see  S.  G.  Drake.  —  A  monument  of  a  people 
previous  to  the  Indians ;  perhaps  Phoenician. 

53  Baylies,  W.  Ms.  letter  dated  Dighton  27  July,  1789,  to  James  Win- 
throp,  with  a  copy  of  the  Dighton  inscription.  In  ms.  Papers,  vol.  i.  1780- 
90,  of  Amer.  Acad,  of  Arts  and  Sciences. 

54  Baylies,  Smith,  West,  Gooding,  Baylies.  Drawing,  made  about 
July  15,  1789. 

55  Beamish,  N.  L.  Discovery  of  America  by  the  Northmen,  1841. 
Republished  in  Prince  Society's  Voyages  of  the  Northmen  to  America, 
1877;  and  in  the  Norraena  Society's  Norse  Discovery  of  America,  1907. 
Ed.  1841,  p.  117.    Illus.,  Plate  III,  after  no.  18b.    Ed.  1907,  pp.  239  f,  242. 


320  DIGHTON  ROCK 

—  Norse;   "no  reasonable  doubt"  of  it;   Rafn  proves  it  "by  unanswerable 
arguments."     A  careless,  inaccurate  account  of  the  Rafn  version. 

56  Beazley,  C.  R.  Dawn  of  Modern  Geography,  1901,  pt.  ii.  pp.  75  f. — 
Not  Norse;  generally  supposed  to  be  Indian. 

57  Beckwith,  H.  I.  Copy  of  Gooding's  drawing  (1789)  in  1864;  now 
in  R.  I.  Hist.  Soc. 

58-61  Belknap,  J.  Corr.  with  E.  Hazard.  In  Belknap  Papers,  1877, 
[58]  i.  353,  June  6,  1784;  [59]  ii.  76,  Nov.  16,  1788;  [60]  ii.  81,  Dec.  13, 
1788;   [61]  ii.  160,  Aug.  20,  1789.  —  Doubtful. 

62  Bentley,  W.  Diary,  1911,  iii.  322  (Oct.  13,  1807).  — Mention;  refer- 
ences to  Kendall,  S.  Harris,  the  two  Baylies. 

63  Berkeley,  Geo.  Visited  Rock  about  1729;  made  an  uncompleted  and 
unpreserved  drawing. 

64  Bicknell,  T.  W.  History  of  Barrington,  1898,  p.  22.  —  Strong  cir- 
cumstantial evidence  for  the  Norse  theory. 

65  Bigelow,  Jacob.  Reference  to  Rock,  Oct.  27,  1852.  In  Proc.  Mass. 
Hist.  Soc.  xvii.  458. 

66  Black mer,  E.  E.  Ms.  paper  on  petroglyphs  of  boulder  at  Lincoln, 
Nebr.,  1917.  —  Mixture  of  Indian  glyphs  with  others  by  pre-glacial  men. 

67  Blackwell,  I.  A.  Colonization  of  Greenland,  and  discovery  of  the 
American  Continent  by  the  Scandinavians.  Translated  from  the  French  of 
M.  Mallet  [1755],  by  Bishop  Percy  [1770].  New  ed.  by  I.  A.  Blackwell, 
1847,  pp.  261  f .  —  Norse  theory  doubtful,  to  say  the  least ;  may  probably 
be  Indian. 

68  Blake,  G.  S.  Ms.  letter  of  March  25,  1865,  to  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc, 
transmitting  essay  on  Rock  by  C.  R.  Hale.  —  No  opinion  expressed. 

69-71  Blake,  L.  I.  Maker  of  plaster  cast  of  the  Rock,  1876.  [70]  Re- 
port to  Old  Col.  Hist.  Soc.  on  transfer  to  the  Soc.  of  title  to  Rock,  Jan. 
1880.  [71]  Description  of  making  of  plaster  cast,  in  letter  to  E.  B.  Dela- 
barre,  Jan.  13,  1916. 

Bliss,  Leonard,  Jr.    See  nos.  32-33. 

72-73  BoDFiSH,  J.  P.  Discovery  of  America  by  the  Northmen  in  the 
Tenth  Century.  In  Proc.  Second  Public  Meeting  held  by  U.  S.  Catholic 
Hist.  Soc.,  Oct.  29,  1885  (1886),  pp.  38-40.  —  Norse ;  uncritical  acceptance 
of  Rafn's  views.  Several  errors  of  statement.  [73]  Discovery  of  New 
England  by  the  Northmen  in  the  Tenth  Century.  Paper  read  before  the 
Bostonian  Soc,  Feb.  8,  1887;  reported  in  Boston  papers  of  the  following 
day.     Probably  identical  with  72. 

74  BoGGiLD,  F.  Ante- Columbian  discovery  of  the  American  Continent 
by  the  Northmen.  In  Hist.  Mag.,  1869,  N.  S.,  v.  170-179.  A  reprint  from 
the  New  Orleans  Sunday  Times.  —  Uncertain  as  to  Rock ;  accepts  Tower 
and  Skeleton  as  Norse. 

75  Border  City  Herald,  June  19,  1876.  —  Mention. 

76  BoRRiNG,  L.  E.  Notices  on  the  Life  and  Writings  of  C.  C.  Rafn, 
1864,  p.  10.  — Mention. 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  321 

n  Boston  Transcript,  Sept.  25,  1848,  p.  2/2.  Account  of  Elton's 
paper. 

78  BouRiNOT,  Sir  J.  G.  Voyages  of  the  Northmen.  In  Proc.  and 
Trans.  Royal  Soc.  of  Canada  for  1891  (1892),  vol.  ix.  sect.  ii.  pp.  291-295. 
—  Rafn's  theory  of  Rock,  but  not  of  Norse  voyages,  now  discredited. 

79  BowEN,  F.  Schoolcraft  on  the  Indian  Tribes.  In  North  Amer. 
Rev.,  1853,  Ixxvii.  252-256.  —  Not  Norse ;  a  meaningless  scrawl,  probably 
Indian. 

80  Bower,  S.  J.  Painter  of  copies  of  17b  and  18b,  1834,  to  illustrate 
lecture  by  A.  H.  Everett,  1838;  now  in  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc. 

81  Bradford,  A.  W.  American  Antiquities,  and  Researches  into  the 
Origin  and  History  of  the  Red  Race,  N.  Y.,  1841,  pp.  184-186.  —  No  men- 
tion of  Rock ;  but  contributes  to  knowledge  of  Indian  pictographs. 

82-83  Brine,  L.  Travels  amongst  American  Indians,  1894,  p.  33  n.  —  In- 
dian; visited  it  in  1870. 

84  Brinley,  G.  Cat.  of  the  Amer.  Library  of,  1881,  pt.  iii.  nos.  5378, 
5405.  —  Mention. 

85-86  Brinton,  D.  G.  Myths  of  the  New  World,  1868,  p.  10.  —  Indian ; 
rude  and  meaningless.  [86]  Prehistoric  Archaeology.  In  Iconographic  En- 
cyclopaedia, 1886,  ii.  pp.  75  f .  —  Indian. 

87-90  Bristol  County,  Mass.,  Northern  District,  Land  Records.  [87] 
Book  253,  p.  92,  July  25,  1857.  Deed  of  the  Rock  from  Thomas  F.  Dean 
to  Niels  Arnzen.  [88]  Book  253,  p.  93.  Jan.  23,  1860.  Deed  of  the  Rock 
from  Niels  Arnzen  to  Royal  Society  of  Northern  Antiquaries.  [89]  Book 
259,  p.  49.  May  27,  1861.  Acknowledgment  of  donation  of  Rock  to  Royal 
Society  of  Northern  Antiquaries,  by  King  Frederick  VII  of  Denmark, 
President  of  the  Society.  [90]  Book  470,  p.  211.  Jan.  30,  1889.  Deed  of 
the  Rock  from  Royal  Society  of  Northern  Antiquaries  to  Old  Colony  His- 
torical Society. 

91  Brittain,  a.  History  of  North  America.  (Ed.  by  G.  C.  Lee),  1903, 
i.  16,  37.  Illus.,  after  no.  18b,  p.  Zl .  —  Not  Norse;  Indian  theory  generally 
accepted;  Vinland  was  New  England. 

92  Brockhaus'  KoNraRSATioNS-LExiKON,  14th  ed.,  1898,  v.  304.  —  In- 
decipherable runes. 

93  Brooks,  C.  T.,  editor.  Controversy  touching  the  Old  Stone  Mill  in 
Newport,  R.  I.,  1851.    See  Antiquarian ;  Melville. 

94  Brooks,  R,  General  Gazetteer,  1876,  p.  294.  —  Never  satisfactorily 
explained, 

95-97  Brown,  C.  W.  Photograph  of  Rock,  May  15,  1915.  [96]  Photo- 
graph of  Rock  and  vicinity  as  seen  from  the  shore.  May  15,  1915.  [97] 
Description  of  composition  of  Rock  and  its  manner  of  weathering,  1916. 
Cited  in  no.  146. 

98  Brown,  Sophia  F.  Ms.  letter  of  Oct.  19,  1864,  to  E.  E.  Hale  con- 
cerning the  "Gooding  drawing"  of  "1790."     Owned  by  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc. 

99  Bryant,  W.  C,  and  Gay,  S.  H.    Popular  History  of  the  U.  S.,  1876, 


522  DIGHTON  ROCK 

i.  60  f.  Illus.,  after  no.  24,  p.  61.  —  Norse  view  questionable;  Indian  theory 
mentioned. 

100  Bull,  Ole.    Visited  Rock,  1857. 

101  Burgess,  G.  C.  With  Augustine  H.  Folsom  as  photographer,  pro- 
duced the  first  photograph  with  Rock  left  unchalked,  in  July,  1868. 

102-103  BusHNELL,  D.  I.  An  Early  Account  of  Dighton  Rock.  In 
Amer.  Anthropologist,  1908,  x.  251-254.  —  Transcript  of  letters  by  Green- 
wood in  British  Museum.  Accompanied  by  first  photographic  reproduction 
of  drawings  no.  Ic  and  5b.  [103]  Letter  of  Oct.  21,  1915,  to  E.  B.  Dela- 
barre.  —  Indian. 

104  Cabot,  J.  E.  Discovery  of  America  by  the  Norsemen.  In  Mass. 
Quart.  Rev.,  1849,  ii.  209.  —  No  sufficient  evidence  for  Norse  theory ;  prob- 
ably Indian. 

105  Cady,  Mrs.  Annie  C.  History  of  New  Eng.  in  Words  of  One 
Syllable,  1888,  p.  15.  Illus.,  after  no.  29c.  —  Meaning  unknown;  Norse 
origin  suggested. 

106  Carter,  B.  B.     Sent  copy  of  inscription  to  Remusat,  1822. 

107  Catlin,  G.  Letters  and  Notes  on  the  Manners,  Customs,  and  Con- 
dition of  the  North  American  Indians,  1841,  ii.  246.  —  Indian;  their  picture- 
writings  are  "generally  totems  of  Indians  who  have  visited  those  places." 

108-109  Chace,  C.  W.  Issued  a  post-card,  by  an  unknown  photog- 
rapher, about  1900.  [109]  Historic  Rocks.  In  Taunton  Gazette,  May  3, 
1905,  p.  9/1-7. —  Non-committal. 

110  Chambers,  W.,  and  R.  Chambers'  Papers  for  the  People,  1850,  no. 
42,  vi.  28.  —  Indian  view  more  reasonable. 

111  Channing,  E.,  and  Hart,  A.  B.  Guide  to  the  Study  of  American 
History,  1897,  pp.  231-234.  —  Related  bibliographical  material. 

112  Chapin,  a.  B.  Ante-Columbian  History  of  America.  In  Amer. 
Biblical  Repository,  2nd  Series,  1839,  ii.  191-197.  — Not  unlikely  that  the 
Norse  engraved  the  letters  and  numerals,  and  the  Indians  the  rest. 

113  Chase,  Henry  E.  Notes  on  the  Wampanoag  Indians.  In  Ann. 
Rep.  Smiths.  Inst,  for  1883   (1885),  p.  894.  — Indian. 

114  Checkley,  Wm.  First  aroused  Dr.  Stiles's  interest  in  Dighton 
Rock,  1766.  Remark  by  Stiles  on  copy  of  Mather  Broadside,  Yale  Uni- 
versity Library. 

115  Chingwauk.     Indian  interpreter  of  inscription,  1839.     See  no.  484. 
116-117  Clarke,  R.   H.     America   discovered  and   Christianized   in   the 

tenth  and  eleventh  centuries.  In  Amer.  Catholic  Quart.  Rev.,  1888,  xiii. 
228  f.  —  Norse  theory  plausible.  [117]  First  Christian  Northmen  in  Amer- 
ica. In  Amer.  Catholic  Quart.  Rev.,  1889,  xiv.  608.  —  Believed  to  be 
Norse. 

118  CoLANGE,  L.  de.     National  Gazetteer,   1884,  p.   119.  —  Mention. 

119  Colburn's  New  Monthly  Mag.  and  Humorist,  1850,  xc.  128-132. 
American  Antiquities.  —  No  mention  of  Rock ;  but  inscribed  rocks  are 
Indian. 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  323 

120  Collins,  J.  F.  Report  on  marine  growths  on  Rock,  in  Pub.  Col. 
Soc.  of  Mass.,  1919,  xx.  396. 

121  Columbian  Reporter.  (Taunton,  Mass.)  Dec.  2,  1829.  Dighton 
Writing  Rock.  —  Never  deciphered. 

122  Cook,  J.  America,  Picturesque  and  Descriptive,  1900,  iii.  121-123.  — 
Probably  Indian, 

123  CoRNHiLL  Mag.,  1872,  xxvi.  457.  Legends  of  Old  America.  —  Men- 
tion. 

124  CoRTEREAL,  MiGUEL.     Probable  first  carver  on  Rock,  1511. 

125  Court  de  Gebelin.  Monde  Primitif,  1781,  viii.  58  f,  561-568.  lUus., 
no.  lie,  Planche  I.  —  Phoenician;  a  complete  translation  given. 

126  Cronau,  R.     Amerika,   1892,   i.    137.  —  Unquestionably  Indian. 

127  Dall,  W.  H.  Pre-Historic  America,  By  the  Marquis  de  Nadaillac. 
Translated  by  N.  D'Anvers.  Ed.  by  W.  H.  Dall.  1884.  Chap.  x.  Origin 
of  Man  in  America,  (For  this  chapter  the  American  editor  is  chiefly  re- 
sponsible.)—  Omits  a  discussion  of  Rock,  favorable  to  the  Norse  view, 
that  appeared  in  the  original;  and  says:  "Theories  ascribing  the  origin  of 
the  Americans  to  full-fledged  races  from  elsewhere  are  enthusiastic  rub- 
bish" (p.  530). 

Dam  martin,  Moreau  de.    See  Moreau  de  Dammartin. 

128  Danforth,  John.  Author  of  first  known  drawing  of  Rock,  Octo- 
ber, 1680;  and  probable  author  of  the  "Danforth  slip"  in  Greenwood  letter 
B. 

129  Dansk  Kunstblad,  March  17,  1837.  Illus.,  after  15c.  —  Charac- 
ters have  runic  appearance,  and  are  evidence  of  connection  of  America  with 
the  old  world. 

130  Davis,  A.  Lecture  on  the  Antiquities  of  Central- America,  and  on 
the  discovery  of  New  England  by  the  Northmen,  five  hundred  years  before 
Columbus,  1838.  At  least  thirty  editions,  with  slightly  varying  titles,  up  to 
1854.  —  Norse.     An  illiterate,  ill-balanced,  uncritical  compilation. 

131-133  Davis,  F.  S.  Author  of  three  photographs:  [131]  Sept.  11, 
1893;     [132]  Jan.  27,  1894;  and  [133]  one  undated,  early  in  1894. 

134  Davis,  John.  Attempt  to  Explain  the  Inscription  on  the  Dighton 
Rock,  In  Memoirs  Amer.  Acad,  of  Arts  and  Sciences,  1809,  iii.  197-205.  — 
Indian  representation  of  deer-traps  and  hunting  scenes. 

135  Davis,  N.  S.  Collaborator  in  production  of  photograph,  no.  28, 
1873. 

136  Dawson,  S.  E.     North  America,  1897,  i.  108  f.  — Mention. 

137  Deane,  C.  Remarks  on  Rock.  In  Proc.  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc,  Oct. 
21,  1867,  p.  7.  — Mention. 

138  Deane,  W.  E.  C.  Maker  of  reduced  copy  of  photograph,  no.  29d, 
1882. 

139-142  De  Costa,  B.  F.  Pre-Columbian  Discovery  of  America  by  the 
Northmen,  1868.  Later  editions,  1890,  1901,  2nd  ed.,  p.  65.  —  Central  por- 
tion may  be  Norse;  the  rest  may  be  Indian.  [140]  Northmen  in  America. 
Paper  read  Dec.  17,  1868.    In  Journal  of  the  Amer.  Geogr.  and  Statistical 


324  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Soc,  1860-1870,  ii.  51.  —  Hardly  considered  as  a  relic  of  the  Northmen. 
[141]  Note  to  no.  74,  Hist.  Mag.,  1869,  v.  178.  —  Cannot  be  relied  on  to 
prove  anything.  [142]  Columbus  and  the  Geographers  of  the  North,  1872, 
pp.  14  f .  —  Not  Norse. 

143-159  Delabarre,  E.  B.  Some  new  facts  concerning  Early  Descrip- 
tions, Reproductions  and  Interpretations  of  Dighton  Rock.  Paper  read  be- 
fore Old  Colony  Hist.  Soc,  Oct.  9,  1915.  Abstract  thereof  in  Taunton 
Herald  News  and  in  Taunton  Gazette  of  same  date.  [144]  Early  Interest 
in  Dighton  Rock.  In  Publications  Col.  Soc.  Mass.,  1917,  xviii.  235-299, 
417.  [145]  Middle  Period  of  Dighton  Rock  History,  id.  1918,  xix.  46-149. 
[146]  Recent  History  of  Dighton  Rock,  id.  1919,  xx.  286-438.  [147]  Bibli- 
ography of  Dighton  Rock,  id.  1919,  xx.  438-462.  [148]  A  Unique  Indian 
Implement  from  Warren.  In  R.  I.  Hist.  Soc.  Coll.,  1919,  xii.  96-100.  [149- 
155]  The  Inscribed  Rocks  of  Narragansett  Bay.  Seven  papers  in  R.  I. 
Hist.  Soc.  Coll.,  1920,  xiii.  1-28,  73-93;  1921,  xiv.  10-22;  1922,  xv.  1-15, 
65-76;  1923,  xvi.  46-64;  1925,  xviii.  51-79.  [149a]  The  seven  Collected 
Papers  in  one  volume,  1925.  [156o]  (with  H.  H.  Wilder)  Indian  Corn- 
hills  in  Mass.  In  Amer.  Anthropologist,  1920,  xxii.  203-225.  [lS6b,  lS6c] 
Photographs,  1920,  1922,  and  others.  [157]  Dighton  Rock.  In  Old-Time  New 
England,  1923,  xiv.  51-72.  Reprinted  in  Portuguese  translation  in  Boletim 
da  Agenda  geral  das  Colonias,  Lisbon,  Ano  III,  no.  20,  Fev.  1927,  143-166. 
[158]  A  Possible  Pre-Algonkian  Culture  in  Southeastern  Mass.  In  Amer, 
Anthropologist,  1925,  xxvii.  359-369.  [159]  Dighton  Rock:  A  Study  of 
the  Written  Rocks  of  New  England,  1928.  —  Illustrations  in  these  papers 
reproduce  all  discoverable  drawings  and  photographs  of  the  inscriptions. 
Detailed  histories,  descriptions,  and  new  interpretations,  including  discovery 
of  the  Cortereal  reading. 

160  De  Roo,  P.  Hist,  of  America  before  Columbus  according  to  docu- 
ments and  approved  authors,  1900,  i.  195,  ii.  307-314.  —  Has  served  a  dozen 
theories ;  may  never  prove  any ;  "is  and  will  remain  forever  a  perplexing 
enigma." 

161-162  Dexter,  G.  Remarks  on  the  Norse  discovery  of  America, 
April,  1880.  In  Proc.  Mass.  Hist.  Soc,  1881,  xviii.  18  f .  —  Not  Norse. 
[162]  In  Memorial  Hist,  of  Boston,  1880,  i.  26.  —  Not  Norse. 

163  Dighton  Bi-Centennial  Celebration,  July  17,  1912,  p.  85.  Illus- 
trations: Seal  of  Dighton,  with  cut  of  Rock  after  no.  40,  on  cover  and  title- 
page;  no.  35,  on  p.  86.  —  Origin  unsettled;  possibly  Norse. 

164-166  Diman,  J.  L.  Critical  Notice  of  De  Costa's  Pre-Columbian 
Discovery.  In  North  Amer.  Rev.,  1869,  cix.  266  f.  —  Mention.  [165]  Set- 
tlement of  Mount  Hope.  Address  .  .  .  delivered  Sept.  24,  1880.  In  Ora- 
tions and  Essays,  1882,  pp.  145  f .  —  Northmen  left  no  trace  behind  them. 
[166]  Editorial  notice  of  W.  J.  Miller's  Notes  concerning  the  Wampanoag 
Tribe  of  Indians.  In  Providence  Daily  Journal,  Nov.  19,  1880,  p.  2/3.  — 
Mount  Hope  inscription  more  like  Norse  writing  than  that  of  Dighton 
Rock.     Latter  considered  by  the  most  competent  judges  to  be  Indian. 

167  Domenech,   E.     Seven   Years    Residence  in  the  great   Deserts   of 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  325 

North- America,  1860,  i.  52,  61.  —  Norse;  confirms  Danish  archaeologists. 
At  first  confounded  with  Indian  pictographs,  "but  on  more  serious  exami- 
nation the  difference  was  perceived,  and  the  archaeologists  acknowledged 
their  mistake." 

168  Douglass,  W.  Summary.  Volume  i.  first  issued  in  numbers,  begin- 
ning in  1747;  as  a  complete  volume,  1749.  Later  editions,  1755,  1760.  Ed. 
of  1760,  i.  170.  —  Natural  honeycombing  of  the  rock,  not  artificial  characters. 

169-170  Drake,  F.  S.  Indian  Tribes  of  the  United  States,  1884,  i.  88  f. 
Illus.,  no.  24,  opp.  p.  88.  —  Condensed  from  Schoolcraft.  [170]  Indian  His- 
tory for  Young  Folks,  1885,  pp.  27  f.     Illus.,  after  no.  29c,  p.  28.  —  Indian. 

171-172  Drake,  S.  A.  Nooks  and  Corners  of  the  N.  Eng.  Coast,  1875, 
pp.  416  f.  Illus.,  after  no.  16c,  p.  416.  —  Generally  admitted  to  be  of  Indian 
origin;  but  may  be  the  work  of  white  men,  possibly  of  Verrazano's  expedi- 
tion. [172]  Book  of  N.  Eng.  Legends  and  Folk  Lore,  1884,  pp.  395,  398.— 
Not  Norse  nor  an  intelligible  record  of  any  kind. 

173  Drake,  S.  G.,  editor.  Historical  Memoir  of  the  Colony  of  New 
Plymouth  by  F.  Baylies.  With  some  corrections,  additions,  and  a  copious 
index,  by  S.  G.  Drake.  1866,  pt.  v.  p.  22  (by  Drake).  —  Baylies'  estimate 
of  its  character  and  antiquity  is  believed  to  be  correct ;  previous  to  Indians, 
perhaps  Phoenician. 

174  DuANE,  Col.  [Wm.?].  His  "speculations  on  this  subject,"  previous 
to  1824,  referred  to  by  Yates  and  Moulton,  i.  82,  have  not  been  located. 

175  Dublin  Review,  1841,  xi.  286.  Successive  Discoveries  of  America. 
Reprinted  in  Amer.  Eclectic,  1842,  iii.  242  ff.  —  Apparently  Phoenician. 

176  Du  Bois,  B.  H.  Did  the  Norse  discover  America?  In  Mag.  of 
Amer.  History,  1892,  xxvii.  374.  —  Not  Norse;  archaeologists  now  agree  as 
to  its  Indian  origin. 

177  Dubuque,  H.  A.  Fall  River  Indian  Reservation,  1907,  p.  35.  — 
Indian. 

178-179  DuNKiN,  Christopher.  Ms.  letters  to  T.  H.  Webb,  concern- 
ing copy  of  Sewall  drawing,  Sept.  24,  Nov.  17,  1834.  In  ms.  Corr.  and  Re- 
ports, R.  I.  Hist.  Soc,  ii.  27,  Z2;  the  copied  drawing  on  p.  23. 

180  Du  SiMiTiERE,  P.  E.  Inscription  in  Massachusetts.  In  ms.  volume 
no.  1412  Quarto  of  Library  Company  of  Phila.  Written  probably  in  1781. 
—  Mention  of  Berkeley's  visit  to  Rock,  Smibert's  drawing,  visit  to  Stiles. 

181  DwiGHT,  W.  R.  Paper  read  before  Ethnographical  Soc.  of  N. 
York.  In  Hist.  Mag.,  1859,  iii.  362.  —  No  opinion  expressed ;  describes  visit 
to  Rock. 

182  Eastman,  S.  Together  with  a  "professed  daguerreotypist  of  Taun- 
ton," made  the  first  published  photographic  representation  of  the  inscrip- 
tion, the  daguerreotype  of  1853.  In  Schoolcraft's  Indian  Tribes,  1854,  iv. 
120,  Plate  14. 

183  Eddy,  W.  P.  With  F.  N.  Ganong  as  photographer,  produced  a 
photograph  in  August,  1908.  Published  in  his  Prospectus  of  the  Eddy 
House,  Dighton. 

184  Ellesmere,  Francis  Edgerton,  Earl  of,  editor.    Guide  to  Northern 


326  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Archaeology,  1848,  pp.  114-119.  —  No  direct  mention  of  the  Rock;  but  ex- 
pounds favorably  Rafn's  views  of  the  visits  of  the  Northmen. 

185  Elliott,  C.  W.  New  England  History,  1857,  i.  34  f.  — "The  rocks 
may  go  for  what  they  are  worth.  The  strongest  proof  is  in  the  Sagas,"  of 
the  Norse  visits  to  New  England. 

186  Ellis,  G.  E.  Remarks  on  Rock.  In  Proc.  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc,  Oct. 
21,  1867,  p.  7  f.  — Indian. 

187  Elton,  Romeo.  On  the  Ante-Columbian  Discovery  of  America.  In 
Brit.  Assn.  Adv.  of  Science,  Rep.  of  18th  Meeting,  August,  1848,  pt.  ii.  p. 
94.  —  "The  Norse  discovery  of  America  ...  is  confirmed  by  the  Dighton 
Rock,  found  there  on  the  arrival  of  the  first  New  England  colonists."  See 
also  no.  77. 

188  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  11th  Edition,  1911,  xxvi.  454.  —  Not 
Norse;  "now  known  to  be  the  work  of  Indians." 

189  English  Review,  1790,  xv,  180-182.  Review  of  papers  by  Lort  and 
Vallancey.  —  Agrees  with  the  view  which  it  attributes  to  Berkeley,  that  the 
lines  are  not  artificial,  but  the  casual  corrosion  of  the  rock  by  the  waves  of 
the  sea. 

190  Everett,  A.  H.  Discovery  of  America  by  the  Northmen.  In  U.  S. 
Mag.  and  Democratic  Rev.,  1838,  ii.  156.  A  drawing  and  a  painting  made 
by  S.  J.  Bower  to  illustrate  this  lecture,  after  nos.  17b  and  18b,  are  owned 
by  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc.  —  Norse  origin  of  Rock  is  doubtful;  but  Norse  set- 
tlement on  Mount  Hope  Bay  is  "beyond  controversy." 

191-192  Everett,  Ed.  Review  of  Gesenius'  Versuch  iiber  die  malt- 
esische  Sprache.  In  North  Amer.  Rev.,  1820,  x.  226  f.  —  Mention.  [192] 
Discovery  of  America  by  the  Northmen.  In  North  Amer,  Rev.,  1838,  xlvi. 
188  f,  197.  —  "Wholly  unconvinced"  of  Norse  theory ;  may  be  due  to  In- 
dians, even  later  than  1620,  or  to  white  men;  cannot  decide  positively. 

193  Everett,  Wm.  Remarks  on  a  proposed  statue  to  Leif  the  North- 
man, May,  1880.     In  Proc.  Mass.  Hist.  Soc,  1881,  xviii.  79  f .  — Mention. 

194  EwBANK,  T,  North  American  Rock-Writing.  In  Hist.  Mag.,  1866, 
X.  257,  272,  306 ;  reprint,  1866.  —  Implies  that  it  is  Indian. 

195  Fales,  E.  Hist,  of  the  Norsemen's  Visits  to  R.  I.  and  Mass.  in 
the  Tenth  Century,  1888,  chap.  VII.  —  A  small  illiterate  pamphlet,  valueless 
but  amusing ;  Norse. 

196  Fall  River  News  and  Taunton  Gazette,  with  assistance  of  Alanson 
Borden.  Our  County  and  Its  People:  A  Descriptive  and  Biographical 
Record  of  Bristol  County,  Mass.,  1899,  p.  197.  —  Mention  of  Dighton  Rock 
newspaper. 

197  Farnum,  a.  Visits  of  the  Northmen  to  Rhode  Island.  R.  I.  Hist. 
Tracts,  no.  2,  1877,  pp.  5,  39.  (First  pubHshed  in  Providence  Journal,  Dec. 
2,  1869).  — Not  Norse. 

198  Farquharson,  R.  J.  On  the  Inscribed  Tablets,  found  .  .  .  in  a 
mound  near  Davenport,  Iowa.  In  Proc.  Davenport  Acad,  of  Nat.  Sciences, 
1876-1878,  ii.  105.    Paper  read  March  9,  1877.  — Two  kinds  of  inscriptions: 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  327 

Indian,  intelligently  translated  by  Chingwauk;  and  Runic,  as  translated  by 
Rafn. 

199  Fay,  J.  S.  Track  of  the  Norsemen.  In  Mag.  of  Amer.  Hist.,  1882, 
viii.  431-434.  Also  issued  as  a  monograph  of  7  pages,  Boston,  1873  and 
1876.  —  Mention.  It  is  believed  that  the  Norsemen  settled  in  Narragansett 
Bay. 

200  Fenner,  H.  M.  Hist,  of  Fall  River,  1906,  p.  1.  [200a]  Hist,  of  Fall 
River,  1911,  p.  6.  —  Possibly  Norse. 

201-202  Fernald,  C.  A.  Visit  to  Rock,  and  drawing  of  its  shoreward 
side,  1903.  [202]  Universal  International  Genealogy  and  of  the  Ancient 
Fernald  Families,  1910.  Illus.,  nos.  16c,  and  36.  Numerous  references  to 
the  Rock,  and  translations  of  it.  —  Rock  contains  inscriptions  by  Marcus 
Agrippa  (29  B.C.),  by  his  son  Graecianus,  by  Christ  (15  A.D.),  and  by  Fnr 
Chia  and  Fna  Bahman  (222  A.D.).  A  masterpiece  of  seriously  intended 
absurdities. 

203  Fewkes,  J.  W.  Letter  in  Boston  Herald,  Sept.  24,  1925,  p.  26,  col. 
8.  —  Of  purely  Indian  origin. 

204  Finch,  John.  On  the  Celtic  Antiquities  of  America.  In  Amer. 
Jour,  of  Sc.  and  Arts  (Silliman's),  1824,  vii.  149-161.  —  Indian,  of  great 
antiquity,  showing  Druidical  influences. 

205-206  Fischer,  J.  Die  Entdeckungen  der  Normannen  in  Amerika, 
1902.  Also  translation  by  B.  H.  Soulsby,  1903,  pp.  v,  vi,  42  f.  — Not 
Norse;  without  doubt  of  Indian  origin.  [206]  Pre-Columbian  Discovery 
of  America.  In  Catholic  Encyclopedia,  1907,  i.  418  f.  —  Not  Norse ;  merely 
Indian  picture-writing. 

207  Fischer,  R.  S.  New  and  Complete  Statistical  Gazetteer  of  the 
U.  S.,  1853,  p.  181.  —  Mention. 

208  Fiske,  J.  Discovery  of  America,  1892,  i.  213-215.  — Not  Norse; 
refers  to  "Rafn's  ridiculous  interpretation  of  this  Algonquin  pictograph." 

209  Fiske,  Wm.  Quoted  in  Islandica,  1909,  vol.  ii,  Editorial  Note. — 
Norse  theory  exhibits  prodigious  play  of  imagination. 

FoLSOM,  A.  H.     Photographer  of  no.  27,  1868. 

210  FoLSOM,  C.  Remarks  on  Rock.  In  Proc.  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc,  Oct. 
21,  1867,  p.  7  f.  — Indian. 

211  FoLSOM,  G.  Discovery  of  America  by  the  Northmen.  In  N.  York 
Rev.,  1838,  pp.  361-363.  —  Norse,  probably;  "we  shall  not  pretend  to  de- 
cide;" but  "no  reasonable  doubt"  of  Rafn's  location  of  Vinland. 

212  Foreign  Quarterly  Review,  1838,  xxi.  89  ff.  Review  of  Antiqui- 
tates  Americanae.  —  Not  Norse;  "enough  of  these  antiquarian  absurdities." 

213  FossuM,  A.  Norse  Discovery  of  America,  1918,  pp.  17  f.  — Not 
Norse;  Indian, 

214-215  Foster,  John  Wells.  On  the  Discovery  of  America.  In  Hes- 
perian, 1838,  i.  27.  —  Not  Norse ;  "I  know  not  why  they  may  not  have  been 
made  by  the  Indians."  [215]  Prehistoric  Races  of  the  United  States,  1873, 
p.  400.  A  6th  ed.,  1887. —  Not  Norse;  "crude  picture-writing  of  the 
savage." 


328  DIGHTON  ROCK 

216  FowLE,  W.  B.,  and  Fitz,  A.  Elementary  Geography  for  Massachu- 
setts Children,  1845,  p.  155.  —  Supposed  to  be  earlier  than  Indians  of  colon- 
ial times. 

217  Franklin,  Benj.  Letter  to  Gebelin,  May  7,  1781 ;  in  Writings  of 
B.  F.,  1906,  viii.  246.  — Mention  of  Rock. 

218  Frederick  VII,  King  of  Denmark.  Letter  to  N.  Arnzen,  May  7, 
1861.  Acknowledgment  of  donation  of  Rock  to  Roy.  Soc.  of  Northern 
Antiquaries,  May  27,  1861.    Sec  nos.  22,  23,  89. 

219  Free,  E.  E.  Pictured  Rocks  of  N.  Amer.  In  N.  Y.  Herald  Trib- 
une, July  18,  1926,  Sect.  Ill,  p.  5.  Illus.,  no.  24.  —  Not  Norse;  Delabarre's 
"Cortereal"  reading  "seems  to  have  solved  the  problem." 

220  Freeman,  F.     History  of   Cape   Cod,   1860,  i.   55. —  Norse. 

221  Friedrichsthal,  The  Chevalier.  Ms.  letter  to  T.  L.  Winthrop, 
July  16,  1840;  accompanied  by  drawing  of  Rock.  Owned  by  Mass.  Hist. 
Soc.  —  Not  Norse. 

222  Frothingham,  N.  L.  Value  of  James  Winthrop's  reproduction  of 
the  inscription.     In  4  Mass.  Hist.  Colls.,  1854,  ii.  142. 

223  FuGL,  N.  Letter  to  Rafn,  Jan.  20,  1840,  on  a  comparison  of  the 
Sewall  drawing  with  that  of  the  R.  I.  Hist.  Soc.  In  Memoires  de  la  Societe 
Royale  des  Antiquaires  du  Nord,  1840-44,  p.  8. 

224  Funk  and  Wagnall's  Standard  Encyclopedia,  1912,  ix.  64.  — 
Indian. 

225-226  Gaffarel,  P.  fitude  sur  les  rapports  de  I'Amerique  et  de 
I'ancien  continent  avant  Christophe  Colomb,  1869,  p.  130.  —  An  indecipher- 
able enigma.  [226]  Histoire  de  la  decouverte  de  I'Amerique  depuis  les 
origines  jusqu'a  la  mort  de  Christophe  Colomb,  1892,  i.  80,  84  f,  88.  Illus., 
after  18b,  opp.  p.  80.  —  An  indecipherable  enigma. 

227  Gagnon,  a.  Les  Scandinaves  en  Amerique.  In  Proc.  and  Trans. 
Royal  Soc.  of  Canada  for  1890,  vol.  viii.  sect.  i.  pp.  43-50.  —  Norse,  accepts 
Rafn's  views. 

228  Gallatin,  A.  Synopsis  of  Indian  Tribes.  In  Archaeologia  Amer., 
1836,  ii.  147.  —  Norse  theory  "out  of  the  question." 

Ganong,  F.  N.     Photographer  of  no.  40,  1908. 

229  Gardner,  J.     Author  of  lithograph  of  1812. 

230-231  Gardner,  W.  B.  Photographer  in  the  production  of  the  Davis- 
Gardner  version,  1873,  and  of  the  Harrison-Gardner  version,  1875.  Author 
of  a  descriptive  paragraph  printed  on  the  mounts  of  these  photographs,  en- 
dorsing the  theory  and  translation  of  Rafn. 

232  Gazetteer  of  the  World,  London,  1886,  i.  216,  630.  —  Mention; 
"supposed  to  be  Norse." 

Gebelin,  Court  de.    See  Court  de  Gebelin. 

233  Gehlen,  a.  Latest  Researches  on  the  Discovery  of  America  by  the 
Northmen.  In  Scientific  American  Supplement,  1903,  Iv.  22874  f .  —  Indian ; 
not  Runic,  but  Algonquin  characters. 

234  Gelcich,  E.     Zur  Geschichte  der  Entdeckung  Amerikas  durch  die 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  329 

Skandinavier.    In  Zeitschrift  der  Gesellschaft  fiir  Erdkunde  zu  Berlin,  1892, 
xxvii.  156.  —  Not  Norse. 

235  Gentleman's  Magazine,  1787,  Ivii.  699.  Review  of  papers  by  Lort 
and  Vallancey.  —  Natural  corrosions  ;  not  Phoenician. 

236  Geogr.  Jour.,  1923,  Ixii.  470.  A  new  Interpretation  of  the  Dighton 
Rock  Inscription.  —  Review  of  no.  157. 

237  GjERSET,  K.  History  of  the  Norwegian  People,  1915,  i.  214.  — 
Indian. 

238  Goodrich,  A.  History  of  the  character  and  achievements  of  the 
so-called  Christopher  Columbus,  1874,  pp.  69-87.  —  No  direct  mention  of 
Rock ;  but  accepts  conclusions  of  Rafn. 

239  Goodrich,  S.  G.  (Peter  Parley).  Lights  and  Shadows  of  Amer. 
Hist.,  1848,  pp.  39-41.     Illus.,  p.  34,  after  no.  20.  —  Norse. 

240  Goodwin,  J.  A.  Pilgrim  Republic,  1888,  pp.  129,  140.  —  Not  Norse; 
may  be  by  some  prehistoric  tribe. 

241  Gosling,  W.  G.  Labrador,  [1916],  p.  1.  —  An  Indian  picture- 
writing. 

242-243  Gravier,  G.  Decouverte  de  I'Amerique  par  les  Normands  au 
Xe  Siecle,  1874,  pp.  91-97.  Illus.  [243]  Notice  sur  le  roc  de  Dighton  .  .  . 
In  Congres  international  des  Americanistes.  Compte-rendu  de  la  1^  session, 
Nancy,  1875,  pp.  166-192.  Also  separate  reprint,  Nancy,  1875.  Illus.,  no. 
18b.  —  Norse.     Gives  a  translation  slightly  different  from  that  of  Rafn. 

244-245  Green,  S.  A.  Remarks  concerning  a  recent  visit  to  Rock.  In 
Proc.  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc,  Oct.  21,  1867,  p.  7.  [245]  Remarks  on  sculptured 
rocks  in  Rhode  Island  lately  visited.     In  ibid.,   Oct.  21,   1868.  —  Indian. 

246-248  Greenwood,  Isaac.  Letter  to  J.  Eames,  Dec.  8,  1730.  Letter 
A,  actually  sent  on  that  date.  Contains  copied  drawings  of  Dan  forth  and 
Greenwood.  In  British  Museum,  Add.  MSS.  6402.47,  106,  107.  [247] 
Letter  to  J.  Eames,  Dec.  8,  1730.  Letter  B,  the  original  rough  draught,  not 
sent  until  April,  1732.  Contains  the  probable  originals  of  the  Danforth 
and  Greenwood  drawings,  and  the  "Danforth  slip."  In  British  Museum, 
Add.  MSS.  4432.185-189.  [248]  Letter  to  J.  Eames,  April  28,  1732.  Letter 
C.     In  British  Museum,  Add.  MSS.  4432.190. 

249  Grinnell,  C.     Photograph,  about   1907. 

250  GuDMONDSSON,  F.  Opinion  on  Rock,  cited  by  J.  Fischer  in  Dis- 
coveries of  the  Northmen,  1903,  p.  42.  —  Rafn's  theory  quite  untenable. 

251  GuiLLOT,  P.  Histoire  des  peuples  du  Nord  ou  des  Danois  et  des 
Normands.  (Translation  of  Henry  Wheaton's  History  of  the  Northmen, 
1831).  .  .  .  fidition  revue  et  augmentee  par  I'auteur  .  .  .  traduit  de 
r Anglais  par  Paul  Guillot,  1844,  pp.  43n,  491-499  (by  translator).  Illus., 
after  no.  18b,  opp.  p.  491.  —  Norse;  accepts  Rafn's  views. 

252  H.,  H.  W.  (H.  W.  Haynes?)  Review  of  De  Roo's  History  of 
America  before  Columbus.  In  Amer.  Hist.  Rev.,  1901,  vi.  801.  —  Mention. 
See  also  no.  280. 

253  H.,  W.  D.  Answer  to  a  query.  In  Notes  and  Queries,  2nd  series, 
1858,  v.  387.  — Not  Norse;  Indian. 


330  DIGHTON  ROCK 

254  Hale,  C.  R.  Essay  on  the  Dighton  Rock,  1865.  An  illustrated  ms., 
104  pp.,  owned  by  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc.  —  Not  Norse ;  Indian. 

255-261  Hale,  E.  E.  Ms.  Diary,  July  31,  1839.  Description  of  a  visit 
to  Rock  and  of  making  a  drawing.  [256]  Ms.  letter  to  S.  F.  Haven,  Oct. 
18,  1864,  accompanying  a  gift  of  the  A.  H.  Everett  drawings  to  Amer, 
Antiq.  Soc.  Owned  by  Society.  See  also  Proc.  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc,  Oct. 
21,  1864,  p.  46n.  [257]  Report  of  Council.  In  Proc.  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc, 
Oct.  21,  1871,  p.  23.  — Mention.  [258]  History  of  the  U.  S.,  1887,  p.  17.— 
Cannot  be  used  as  evidence  for  the  Norse  theory.  [259-260]  A  Harvard 
Undergraduate  in  the  Thirties.  In  Harper's  Mag.,  1916,  cxxxii.  696.  — 
Mention  of  Rock,  under  dates  of  Nov.  20,  24,  1837.  [261]  Life  and  Letters. 
Ed.  by  E.  E.  Hale,  Jr.,  1917,  i.  Z2  f  45,  59-63,  199,  360. 

262  Hale,  Horatio,  or  Nathan.  Copy  of  Sewall  drawing,  and  tran- 
script of  writing  on  it,  Nov.  17,  1834.  In  ms.  Corr.  and  Reports,  R.  I.  Hist. 
Soc,  ii.  23. 

263  Hall,  Benj.  H.  Hist,  of  Eastern  Vermont,  1858,  p.  588.  —  Men- 
tion. 

264-266  Hall,  J.  W.  D.  Two  newspaper  contributions,  1877,  in  Old 
Col.  Hist.  Soc.  [264]  Dighton  Rock.  [265]  The  Norsemen  and  Dighton 
Rock.  —  Norse.  [266]  Dighton  Writing  Rock.  In  Colls.  Old  Colony  Hist. 
Soc,  1889,  no.  4,  p.  97.  —  History  of  ownership. 

267  Hamlin,  A.  C.  Cited  by  Lodge  in  1874,  as  having  unsuccessfully 
attempted  a  cast  of  Rock,  and  being  of  opinion  that  it  is  an  ordinary  Indian 
pictograph  with  no  runic  characters  on  it.  A  resident  of  Dighton  recalls 
an  attempted  cast,  probably  this  one,  made  not  later  than  1870. 

268  Harper's  Encyclopedia  of  United  States  History,  [1901],  x, 
article  Vineland.     Illus.,  after  no.  29c.  —  Not   Norse. 

269  Harris,  S.  Translation  of  Dighton  Rock  inscription,  about  1807. 
Cited  by  Kendall  [324],  and  E.  Everett  [192].  —  A  Hebrew  inscription  in 
ancient  Phoenician  characters. 

270  Harrison,  A.  M.  Made  a  topographical  survey  of  Taunton  river 
in  1875 ;  embodied  particulars  concerning  Rock  in  a  separate  paper  filed  in 
the  office  of  the  Survey;  signed  some  copies  of  the  Harrison-Gardner  photo- 
graph as  having  been  present  when  taken.  See  Report  of  the  U.  S.  Coast 
Survey  for  the  year  ending  June,  1876;  U.  S.  Document,  1688;  Executive 
Document  no.  Z7,  44th  Congress,  2nd  session.  Senate,  p.  18. 

271  Haskel,  D.,  and  Smith,  J.  C.  Complete  Descriptive  and  Statisti- 
cal Gazetteer  of  the  U.  S.,  1850,  p.  177.  —  Mention. 

272  Hathaway,  C.  A.,  Jr.  Photograph,  with  Rock  unchalked,  taken 
in  1907. 

273-277  Haven,  S.  F.  Archaeology  of  the  U.  S.  In  Smithsonian  Con- 
tributions to  Knowledge,  1856,  viii.  28-35,  106  f,  133.  —  Indian.  [274]  Re- 
port of  Librarian.  In  Proc.  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc,  April  29,  1863,  p.  31.  [275] 
Report  of  Librarian.  In  ibid,  Oct.  21,  1864,  p.  41.  [276]  Report  of  Li- 
brarian. In  ibid,  Oct.  21,  1867,  p.  7.  [277]  Report  of  Council.  In  ibid, 
April  26,  1871,  p.  21.  — Not  Norse. 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  331 

278  Hawthorne,  H.  Old  Seaport  Towns  of  New  England,  1916,  pp. 
250  f.  — Not  Norse. 

279  Hay,  John.    Erato:  Class-day  poem,  June  10,  1858. 

280  Haynes,  H.  W.  Historical  character  of  the  Norse  sagas.  In  2 
Proc.  Mass.  Hist,  Soc,  189,  v.  334  f.  —  Mention.    See  also  no.  252. 

281-283  Hayward,  J.  Gazetteer  of  N.  England,  1839.  [282]  Gazetteer 
of  Mass.,  1846,  pp.  Z2,,  137.  [283]  Gazetteer  of  the  U.  S.  1853,  p.  350.— 
Mention. 

284-286  Hazard,  E.  Corr.  with  J.  Belknap.  In  Belknap  Papers,  1877, 
[284]  i.  343,  May  17,  1784;  [285]  i.  361,  June  21,  1784;  [286]  ii.  77,  Nov. 
22,  1788.  —  Undeciphered. 

287  Hazard,  T.  R.  Miscellaneous  Essays  and  Letters,  1883,  p.  329. — 
Norse. 

288  Headley,  p.  C.    Island  of  Fire,  1875,  p.  65.  —  Mention. 

289  Henrici,  E.  Amerikafahrer  von  Leif  bis  auf  Columbus.  In  Beilage 
zur  Allgemeine  Zeitung,  1892,  no.  87,  April  12,  pp.  1-5. —  Norse.  "The 
Runic  stone  of  Dighton  causes  the  last  doubt  concerning  the  situation  of 
Weinland  to  disappear.  The  voyages  of  the  Northmen  extended  surely  to 
Florida  and  with  the  highest  probability  even  to  Brazil.  Everywhere  are 
found  traces  of  the  ancient  colonies." 

290  Herbermann,  C.  G.  Northmen  in  America.  In  Hist.  Records  and 
Studies,  published  by  U.  S.  Catholic  Hist.  Soc,  1903,  vol.  iii.  pt.  i.  pp.  185- 
204.  —  "Instead  of  being  runic,  turns  out  to  be  Indian  picture-writing." 

291  Hermannsson,  H.     Northmen  in  America.     In  Islandica,  1909,  ii. 

—  No  vestiges  left  by  the  Northmen  have  been  found  (Introduction).    Men- 
tion of  Rock  in  the  bibliography. 

292-293  Hermes,  K.  H.  Entdeckung  von  Amerika  durch  die  Islander  im 
zehnten  und  elften  Jahrhunderte,  1844,  Pref.  and  p.  123.  Illus.,  after  no. 
18b.  —  Norse;  a  "most  unambiguously  testifying  monument."  [293]  Dis- 
covery of  America  by  the  Icelanders.  Translated  by  F.  J.  Grund.  In  Gra- 
ham's Amer.  Monthly  Mag.,  1853,  xlii.  545-562.  —  An  abstract  of  the  Ger- 
man work. 

294-295  HiGGiNSON,  T.  W.  Visit  of  the  Vikings.  In  Harper's  Mag., 
1882,  Ixv.  515-527.  Illus.,  after  no.  29c,  p.  515.  — Not  Norse;  Indian. 
[295]  History  of  the  U.  S.,  1882,  pp.  28-51.     Illus.,  after  no.  29c,  p.  45. 

—  Reproduces  no.  294. 

296  HiGGiNSON,  T.  W.,  and  MacDonald,  W.  History  of  the  U.  S., 
1905,  pp.  40  ff.  —  Essentially  the  preceding  account,  with  a  few  alterations. 

297  Hill,  I.  Antiquities  of  America  Explained,  1831,  pp.  70-76.  Illus., 
no.  16b.  —  Inscription  due  to  Jewish  and  Tyrian  sailors,  in  second  month  of 
tenth  year  of  the  reign  of  Solomon  (about  1000  B.  C.)  ;  full  translation. 

298  Hitchcock,  E.  Explanatory  note  in  Catalog  of  New  England 
Indian  Relics  in  Gilbert  Museum  of  Amherst  College,  2nd  ed.,  1904.  Illus., 
after  no.  29c,  Plate  VI. 


332  DIGHTON  ROCK 

299  Hoffman,  W.  J.  Visited  Rock,  1886;  cited  on  its  rapid  wear,  in 
10th  Ann.  Rep.,  Bur.  Amer.  Eth.,  p.  86. 

300  Holland,  W.  J.  Petroglyphs  at  Smith's  Ferry,  Pennsylvania.  In 
International  Congress  of  Americanists,  13th  session  held  in  New  York  in 
1902,  pp.  1-4.  —  Similar  to  Dighton  Rock ;  due  to  Indians. 

301  HoLMBERG,  A.  E.  Skandinaviens  Hallristningar,  1848,  pp.  146-153. 
Illus.,  no.  18b,  tab.  45,  fig.   165.  —  Norse ;  the  Rafn  version. 

302  Holmes,  A.     Life  of  Ezra  Stiles,  1798,  p.  119.  —  Non-committal. 
303-304  Holmes,  W.  H.    Dighton  Rock.    In  Art  and  Archaeology,  1916, 

iii.  53-55.  IIIus.,  no.  33.  —  Indian.  Apparently  a  verbatim  reprint  from 
Thomas,  with  an  addition  concerning  Lundy.  [304]  Handbook  of  Aborigi- 
nal Amer.  Antiquities,  Part  I,  The  Lithic  Industries.  Bur.  Amer.  Ethnol., 
Bull.  60,  1919,  pp.  XV,  101,  355.  — Indian. 

305  HoRSFORD,  E.  N.  Discovery  of  America  by  Northmen.  Address 
at  the  unveiHng  of  the  statue  of  Leif  Eriksen,  Oct.  29,  1887  (1888),  pp. 
23  f.,  65.     Illus.,  after  17b,  p.  24. —  Not  Norse;  Indian. 

306  HosMER,  Hezekiah  L.  Origin  of  Our  Antiquities.  In  Overland 
Monthly,  1872,  ix.  531  f.  —  Norse;  if  Icelandic  manuscripts  are  genuine, 
"there  is  abundant  reason  to  believe  that  all  the  antiquities  of  North  Amer- 
ica owe  to  the  Northmen  their  origin." 

307  Hough,  Clara  S.  Is  Lost  Sailor's  Name  cut  on  Dighton  Rock? 
In  New  Bedford  Sunday  Standard,  Aug.  29,  1926,  Sect.  4,  pp.  1,  2.  Illus., 
no.  43a.  —  Exposition  of  Cortereal  theory. 

308  HovGAARD,  W.  Voyages  of  the  Norsemen  to  America,  1914,  pp. 
115  ff.  —  Not  Norse;  Indian. 

309  Howard,  R.  H.,  and  Crocker,  H.  E.  Popular  History  of  N.  Eng., 
1881,  i.  122.  —  Mention. 

310  Howley,  M.  F.  Vinland  Vindicated.  In  Proc.  and  Trans.  Roy. 
Soc.  of  Canada,  1898,  ser.  2,  vol.  4,  sec.  2,  p.  77.  —  "Doubtful  hieroglyphics 
of  Dighton." 

311  Humboldt,  F.  H.  A.  von.  Vues  des  Cordilleres  et  monuments  des 
peuples  indigenes  de  I'Amerique,  1810,  i.  180.  Researches,  concerning  the 
Institutions  and  Monuments  of  the  Ancient  Inhabitants,  of  America,  .  .  , 
Translated  into  English  by  H.  M.  Williams,  1814,  i.  149-155. —  Work  of 
the  natives. 

312  Hurd,  I.  H.,  compiler.  Hist.  Bristol  Co.,  Mass.,  1883,  p.  250.— 
Not  Norse. 

313  HuTT,  F.  W.  Review  of  Cortereal  theory,  in  Taunton  Gazette, 
July  16,  1920,  p.  16.  [313a]  Editor,  Hist.  Bristol  Co.,  Mass.,  1924,  i.  16.  — 
Mention. 

314  Independent  Chronicle,  Boston,  May  19,  1819,  p.  1/5.  American 
Antiquities.  From  Newburyport  Herald  of  May  4.  The  "Writing  Rock." 
—  Mention. 

315  Independent  de  Fall  River,  L'.  14  Juillet,  1915.  pp.  17,  23.  Les  Phe- 
niciens  ont-ils  connu  I'Amerique?   L'inscription  du  Rocher  de  Dighton.    Des 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  333 

Pheniciens  auraient  visite  la  Baie  Mount  Hope,  dans  I'antiquite.     Illus.,  no. 
lie,  p.  17.  —  A  reprint  from  Gebelin;  editorial  comment  non-committal. 

316  Irving,  W.  Review  of  Bancroft's  History  of  the  U.  S.,  1841.  In 
Biographical  and  Critical  Miscellanies,  1863,  i.  330  f.  —  Indian. 

317  Jameson,  J.  F.,  and  Buel,  J.  W.  Encyclopedic  Dictionary  of  the 
United  States,  1901,  i.  219.  —  Rafn's  view  "has  now  been  generally  aban- 
doned, though  the  central  portion  may  be  Norse." 

318  JoMARD,  E.  F.  Seconde  note  sur  une  pierre  gravee,  trouvee  dans 
un  ancien  tumulus  americain,  et  .  .  .  sur  I'idiome  libyen,  [1845].  —  In- 
scription is  in  Libyan  characters.     See  no.  557. 

319  Journal  Politique  ou  Gazette  des  Gazettes,  Bouillon,  June, 
1781,  p.  65.  —  Gebelin's   Carthaginian  interpretation. 

320  Julius,  N.  H.  Letter  to  R.  I.  Hist.  Soc,  May  23,  1839;  in  ms. 
Correspondence  and  Reports,  iii.  43.  —  Rock  is  Norse,  "speaking  clearly 
and  boldly  of  the  first  white  Americans." 

321  Kaiser,  W.  Entdeckungen  der  Normannen  im  Gronland  und  in 
Amerika,  1882,  p.  17.  —  Norse;  "for  unbiassed  observers  no  doubt  can  re- 
main that  it  is  an  inscription  by  Thorfinn." 

322-324  Kendall,  E.  A.  Painting  in  oil,  1807.  Now  in  Peabody  Mu- 
seum. [323]  Account  of  the  Writing-Rock  in  Taunton  River.  In  Memoirs 
Amer.  Acad,  of  Arts  and  Sciences,  1809,  iii.  164-191.  A  letter  to  J.  Davis, 
dated  Oct.  29,  1807.  Illus.,  no.  15b.  —  Origin  undetermined.  [324]  Travels, 
1809,  ii.  219-232;  iii.  205-222.  —  Unquestionably  Indian;  an  unreadable 
record  of  some  unknown  transaction. 

325  KiNNicuTT,  L.  N.     Indian  Names  in  Plymouth  County,  1909,  p.  42. 

—  Indian. 

326  Kittredge,  F.  E.  Letter  to  Edwin  M.  Stone.  In  Proc.  R.  I.  Hist. 
Soc.,  1872-73;  Report  by  the  Librarian,  Jan.  21,  1873,  p.  72.  —  No  opinion 
expressed. 

327  Kittredge,  G.  L.  Cotton  Mather's  Scientific  Communications  to 
the  Royal  Society.     In  Proc.  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc,  April,  1916,  xxvi.  18-67. 

328  Kneeland,  S.     American  in  Iceland,  1876,  p.  224.  —  Norse. 

329  KuNSTMANN,  F.  Entdeckung  Amerikas,  1858,  p.  29.  —  Norse;  ac- 
cepts Rafn's  views. 

330  Lagreze,  G.  B.  de.  Les  Normands  dans  les  deux  mondes,  1890,  p. 
352.  —  "In  several  parts  of  America  have  been  found  stones  with  runic  in- 
scriptions." 

331  Laing,  S.  The  Heimskringla,  1844,  i.  174-183;  2nd  ed.,  1889,  pp. 
218  ff.  Illus.,  after  no.  17b,  p.  175;  nos.  14e  and  18b,  p.  176.  — Not  Norse; 
might  belong  to  any  people  or  period  one  may  please  to  fancy. 

332  Lanier,  S.  Psalm  of  the  West.  In  Lippincott's  Mag.,  June,  1876; 
and  Poems,  1909,  pp.  114-138. 

ZZZ  Larned,  J.  N.    The  Literature  of  Amer.  Hist.,  1902,  p.  56,  no.  750. 

—  Mention. 

334  Lathrop,   John.     Letter   to   J.    Davis,    Aug.    10,    1809,   describing 


334  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Washington's  visit  to  the  Harvard  Museum.  In  Proc.  Mass.  Hist.  Soc, 
1869,  X.  114.  —  Washington  believed  it  to  be  Indian, 

335  Lelev^^el,  J.  Geographie  du  Moyen  Age,  1852,  iii-iv  (in  qne  volume), 
p.  82.    Illus.,  after  no.  17b,  Plate  I.  —  Norse;  accepts  Rafn's  views. 

2)Z6  Libri-Carrucci  dalla  Sammaia,  G.  B.  I.  Timoleone,  Conte.  In- 
troduction, dated  March  7,  1861,  to  Cat.  of  the  Mathematical,  Historical, 
Bibliographical  and  Miscellaneous  portion  of  the  Celebrated  Library  of  M. 
Guglielmo  Libri,  pt.  i.  p.  vi.  —  Inscriptions  left  by  the  Norsemen  on  rocks 
are  the  best  proof  of  their  visits  to  America. 

2>?i7  Lippincott's  Gazetteer  of  the  World,  1906,  p.  203.  —  Mention. 

338  Lodge,  H.  C.  Critical  Notice  of  Gravier's  Decouverte  de  I'Ameri- 
que  par  les  Normands.  In  North  Amer.  Rev.,  1874,  cxix.  173-175.  —  All 
the  best  American  authorities  agree  that  it  is  wholly  of  Indian  workman- 
ship. 

339  LoFFLER,  E.  Vineland  Excursions  of  the  ancient  Scandinavians. 
In  Congres  international  des  Americanistes.  Compte-rendu  de  la  5^  session, 
Copenhague,  1883,  pp.  64-73.     Illus.,  after  no.  29b,  p.  70.  —  Indian. 

340  LoHER,  F.  VON.  Cited  by  Peschel,  Jenaer  Literaturz.,  1874,  as  re- 
porting that  Bancroft  visited  Rock.  (Gravier  reports  Loher  as  saying  that 
Bancroft  found  the  stone.) 

341  Lord,  Avery  E.  Brown  Professor  Solves  Puzzle  of  Dighton  Rock. 
In  Providence  Journal,  Oct.  10,  1926,  sect.  F,  p.  2.  Illus.,  from  no.  43fc.  — 
Exposition  of  Cortereal  theory. 

342-343  LoRT,  M.  Account  of  an  antient  Inscription  in  North  America. 
Read  Nov.  23,  1786.  In  Archseologia,  1787,  viii.  290-301.  Illus.,  nos.  Id, 
2a,  5c,  lib,  in  Plates  XVIII,  XIX.  — First  historical  survey.  At  first 
thought  the  inscription  was  Indian ;  non-committal  as  to  present  opinion. 
[343]  Letter  to  Bishop  Percy,  April  16,  1790.  In  J.  B.  Nichols's  Illustra- 
tions of  the  Literary  History  of  the  Eighteenth  Century,  1848,  vii.  504-506. 

—  Much  disposed  now  to  believe  it  due  to  natural  corrosion  of  the  rock. 
344-345  LossiNG,  B.  J.     Pictorial  Field-Book  of  the  Revolution.     First 

issued  in  numbers,  1850-52;  frequently  reprinted;  i.  633-635.     Illus.,  no.  16c. 

—  Record  of  a  battle  with  Indians,  made  by  Scandinavians  acquainted  with 
the  Phoenician  alphabet.  [345]  Centennial  Edition  History  of  the  United 
States,  1876,  p.  35.  —  Norsemen  left  no  traces  except  the  tower  at  Newport. 

346-347  Lowell,  J.  R.  Biglow  Papers  (1890).  [346]  1st  Series,  1848, 
no.  vii.  p.  115;  [347]  2nd  Series,  1862,  no.  iii.  p.  278;  iv.  p.  297;  v,  pp.  311- 
318.  —  A  parody  of  the  Norse  theory. 

348  Lubbock,  Sir  J.  Pre-historic  Tinjes,  1865.  3rd  ed.  1872,  p.  278.— 
Non-committal. 

349-350  LuNDY,  J.  P.  Communications  on  Mongolian  symbolism  and 
on  Dighton  Rock.  In  Proc.  Numismatic  and  Antiq.  Soc.  of  Philadelphia 
for  1883,  pp.  7-8.  Meetings  of  March  1,  April  5.  —  Chinese ;  full  transla- 
tion given.  [350]  The  Dighton  Rock  Inscriptions.  In  Phila.  Ev.  Tele- 
graph, April  12,  1883,  p.  6,  col.  1.  —  Chinese. 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  335 

351  M'CuLLOCH,  J.  R.  Gazetteer,  1843.  —  Never  satisfactorily  ex- 
plained. 

352-353  McLean,  J.  P.  Study  of  American  Archaeology.  In  Uni- 
versalist  Quart,  and  Gen.  Rev.,  1881,  xxxviii.  (N.  S.  xviii.)  285.  —  In- 
dian; contains  numerous  errors.  [353]  Critical  examination  of  the  evidences 
adduced  to  establish  the  theory  of  the  Norse  discovery  of  America.  In 
American  Antiquarian,  1892,  xiv.  33-40,  87-94,  139-154,  189-196,  271-276. 
Separate  reprint,  Chicago,  1892.  Illus.,  after  no.  24,  opp.  p.  192.  —  Not 
Norse. 

354  Madden,  Sir  F.  Index  to  the  Additional  Manuscripts  preserved 
in  the  British  Museum,  1849.  —  Reference,  under  Greenwood. 

355  Magnusen,  F.  Translation  of  the  inscription  as  a  Norse  record. 
In  Antiquitates  Americanse,  1837,  pp.  378-382. 

356-357  Mallery,  G.  Pictographs  of  the  North  American  Indians.  In 
Fourth  An.  Rep.  Bureau  Amer.  Ethnology  for  1882-83  (1886  [1887]),  pp. 
20,  250.  —  An  Indian  pictograph.  [357]  Picture-writing  of  the  Amer- 
ican Indians.  In  Tenth  An.  Rep.  Bureau  of  Amer.  Ethnology  for  1888-89 
(1893  [1894]),  pp.  35,  86,  762.  Illus.,  no.  24,  p.  86,  fig.  49;  nos.  Id,  2a,  5c, 
lib,  12b,  14e,  15c,  16c,  18b,  on  Plate  LIV,  p.  762.  — An  Indian  pictograph. 

358  Marbois,  Francois  Marquis  de  Barbe.  Journal  d'un  voyage  de 
France  en  Amerique  a  bord  de  la  Fregate  la  Sensible  (17  June,  1779,  to  6 
Oct.,  1784).  Ms.  in  possession  of  Albert  E.  Lownes.  Illus.,  no.  11.  —  Men- 
tion of  current  theories;  Indian. 

359  Marsh,  G.  P.  Man  and  Nature,  1864,  p.  60n.  —  Not  Norse;  but 
accepts  Rafn's  localities. 

360-364  Mass.  Hist.  Society.  Proceedings,  ii.  309,  March,  1845 ;  viii. 
96,  Jan.  1865;  x.  470,  Feb.  1869;  liv.  49,  Nov.  1920.  Other  references  to 
publications  of  the  society  under  names  of  persons.  —  Mention.  [364]  Col- 
lections, vol.  75,  1922,  p.  53,  no,  Z12.  —  Mention  of  Mather  Broadside,  1714. 

365-371  Mather,  Cotton.  Dedicatory  Epistle  to  Sir  H.  Ashurst,  in 
Wonderful  Works  of  God  Commemorated,  1690.  Illus.,  no.  lb.  —  First 
printed  account  and  illustration  of  the  inscription.  [366]  2nd  ed.,  1703. 
[367]  Life  of  John  Eliot,  1691,  p.  81.  —  "Unaccountable  characters."  [368] 
Letter  to  R.  Waller,  Nov.  28,  1712.  Ms.  in  Letter-Book  of  Royal  Soc., 
M  2.21.32.  [369]  Extract  of  several  Letters  from  C.  Mather,  to  J.  Wood- 
ward, and  R.  Waller.  In  Phil.  Trans.,  no.  339,  April-June,  1714,  xxix.  70, 
71.  Illus.,  no.  2a,  in  Plate,  Fig.  8.  [370]  Republication  of  letter  on  Rock. 
In  Phil.  Trans.,  abridged  by  H.  Jones,  1721,  vol.  v.  pt.  ii.  p.  165.  Illus.,  no. 
2a,  Plate  VIII,  Fig.  72,  p.  190.  [371]  Broadside,  with  description  of  Rock 
and  drawing  of  the  inscription.  Date  of  issue  unknown,  probably  about 
1714. 

372  Mathieu,  C.  L.  Le  Printemps,  Nancy,  [1816?].  Contains  an  ac- 
count of  Rock,  reprinted  in  American  Monthly  Mag.  and  Critical  Rev., 
1817,  i.  257-262.  —  A  record  made  by  In,  son  of  Indios,  King  of  Atlantis,  in 
Anno  Mundi  1902. 

yjl  Melville,  D.     Letter  concerning  Rock,  the  Stone  Tower  in  New- 


336  DIGHTON  ROCK 

port,  and  the  Antiquarian  hoax,  March  23,  1848.     In  Brooks's  Controversy- 
touching  the  Old  Stone  Mill,  1851,  pp.  51-54.  —  Indian. 

374  Merrill,  F.  T.  Painting  of  the  Rock,  1901 ;  in  possession  of  R. 
Davol. 

375  Meyer's  Konversations-Lexikon.  6th  ed.,  1904,  v.  3.  —  Not 
Norse. 

2)76-377  Miller,  W.  J.  Notes  concerning  the  Wampanoag  Tribe  of 
Indians,  1880,  p.  119.  2nd  ed.,  under  title  King  Philip  and  the  Wampanoags 
of  R.  I.,  1885.  —  No  direct  mention  of  Rock;  but  the  one  on  Mount  Hope 
Bay  is  Norse.  [Z77]  Bi-Centennial  of  Bristol,  R.  I.,  1881,  p.  66. —  Norse; 
follows  Rafn. 

378  Mitchill,  S.  L.  Discourse  delivered  Nov.  7,  1816.  In  Archse- 
ologia  Americana,  1820,  i.  340.  —  Disputes  Mathieu's  theory.  See  also  no. 
8. 

379  MoGK,  E.  Entdeckung  Amerikas  durch  die  Nordgermanen.  In  Mit- 
theilungen  des  Vereins  fiir  Volkskunde  zu  Leipzig,  1892,  pp.  57-89.  Separ- 
ate reprint,  1893.  —  Not  Norse ;  Indian. 

380  MoiiAWK  Indians,  cited  by  Kendall  in  1807,  in  Memoirs  Amer. 
Acad,  of  Arts  and  Sciences,  1809,  iii.  182.  —  Interpretation  of  the  inscrip- 
tion as  an  Indian  record. 

381  Monthly  Review,  1788,  Ixxix.  424.  Review  of  Archseologia,  1787, 
viii.  —  Mention. 

382  Montjau,  E.  M.  de.  Reads  summary  of  Gravier's  paper,  1875, 
Congr.  internat.  des  Amer. 

383  MoosMULLER,  P.  O.  Europaer  in  Amerika  vor  Columbus,  1879,  pp. 
130,  138-143.     English  translation,  1911.  —  Norse;   follows  Rafn's  account. 

384  MoREAU  DE  Dam  martin.  La  Pierre  de  Taunston.  In  Journal  de 
rinstitut  Historique,  1838,  ix.  145-154.  Published  also  as  an  autotype  litho- 
graph under  the  title :  Explication  de  la  Pierre  de  Taunston,  Paris,  n.d.,  28 
pp.  Illus.,  no.  lid;  a  second  plate  analyzing  and  explaining  the  same. — 
An  Egyptian  representation  of  the  celestial  sphere. 

385  Morgan,  T.  Old  found  lands  in  North  America.  In  Trans.  Royal 
Hist.  Soc,  1874,  N.  S.,  iii.  75-97.  —  Does  not  seem  to  be  Scandinavian. 

386  Morse,  Abner.  Further  Traces  of  Ancient  Northmen  in  Amer., 
1861,  p.  20. --Norse. 

387  Morse,  E.  S.  Mars  and  its  Mystery,  1906,  p.  97.  —  Discusses  di- 
vergence in  drawings. 

388  Morse,  J.,  and  R.  C.  New  Universal  Gazetteer,  3rd  ed.,  1821,  p, 
221.  —  "No  satisfactory  account  has  been  given." 

389  Moulton,  J.  W.  History  of  the  State  of  New  York.  By  J.  V.  N. 
Yates  and  J.  W.  Mouhon,  1824,  vol.  i.  pt.  i.  pp.  84-86,  313.  "Mr.  Moulton 
is  in  fact  the  sole  author  of  this  scarce  book"  (Sabin,  xii.  440).  —  Inclined 
to  believe  it  of  Phoenician  origin. 

390  Mulhall,  M.  McM.  Explorers  in  the  New  World  before  and 
after  Columbus  and  Story  of  Jesuit  Missions  of  Paraguay,  1909,  p.  4n.  — 
Mention. 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  337 

391  MuNRO,  W.  H.  Hist,  of  Bristol,  R.  I.,  1880,  p.  17.  —  Norse  settled 
on  Taunton  River. 

392  Nadaillac,  J.  F.  A.  du  Pouget,  Marquis  de.  L'Amerique  pre- 
historique,  1883,  pp.  556  f.  (For  American  edition  of  1884,  see  Dall). — 
Certainly  not  Indian;  Norse  theory  the  most  plausible  explanation. 

393  Nason,  E.  Gazetteer  of  Mass.,  1874;  enlarged  ed.,  1890,  1st  ed., 
pp.  78  f,  181;  2nd  ed.,  pp.  142  f,  274.  Illus.,  after  no.  20.  —  Probably 
Indian. 

394  Nation,  The,  N.  Y.,  1882,  xxxv.  178.  Comment  on  Higginson's 
paper  in  Harper's  Mag.  —  Mention. 

395-396  National  Intelligencer,  Washington,  Sept.  28,  1848,  p.  3/2; 
Oct.  4,  1848,  p.  3/1.  — Mention. 

397-398  National  Quarterly  Review,  1873,  xxviii.  96.  Discovery  of 
America  by  the  Northmen.  —  Norse  reading  has  been  questioned.  [398] 
1876,  xxxiii.  20.     Pre-Columbian  Discoveries  of   America.  —  Doubtful. 

399  Neal,  D.  History  of  N.  Eng.,  1720,  ii.  593.  2nd  ed.,  1747.  — Quota- 
tion from  Cotton  Mather. 

400  Nelson's  Loose-leaf  Encyclopedia,  1907.  Dighton  Rock.  — 
Indian. 

401  Neukomm,  E.  Les  Dompteurs  de  la  Mer,  1895.  Tw^o  translations: 
Rulers  of  the  sea,  Boston,  1896 ;  and  Tamers  of  the  Sea,  N.  Y.,  1897.  1896 
ed.,  pp.  99-101.  Illus.,  after  no.  18b,  p.  101.  — Norse;  follows  Rafn's 
account. 

402  New  Bedford  Mercury,  May,  1819.  Notice  on  Rock,  quoted  in 
Independent  Chronicle,  May  19,   1819.  —  Mention. 

403  Newburyport  Herald,  May  4,  1819.  Quoted  in  Independent  Chron- 
icle, May  19,  1819.  —  Mention. 

404  New  International  Encyclopedia.  1st.  ed.  1902;  2nd  ed.  1915. — 
Indian. 

405  New  York  Hist.  Society,  Proceedings,  Nov.  3,  1846:  appointment 
of  a  committee  consisting  of  H.  R.  Schoolcraft,  M.  S.  Bidwell,  and  J.  R. 
Bartlett,  "to  investigate  the  character  and  purport  of  the  ancient  pictorial 
inscription  or  symbolic  figures  of  the  (so-called)  Dighton  Rock."  There 
is  no  record  of  a  report  by  this  committee;  but  see  nos.  46,  483,  484. 

406  New  York  Times,  1890.    See  no.  6. 

407  New  York  Times,  Mid-Week  Pictorial,  Nov.  4,  1926,  p.  18.  Has 
the  Mystery  of  Famous  Dighton  Rock  Been  Solved?  Illus.,  no  43a,  43fo.  ■ — 
Exposition  of  Cortereal  theory. 

408  Nichols,  W.  D.  Berkley.  In  Hurd's  History  of  Bristol  County, 
Mass.,  1883,  p.  181.  —  Mention. 

NoRRAENA  Society.    See  nos.  14,  55. 

409  Norsemen  Memorial  Committee,  Boston,  Jan.  12,  1877.  Leaflet 
issued  by  the  committee  announcing  its  election  Dec.  8,  1876,  to  take  meas- 
ures to  erect  a  monument  in  honor  of  the  Norsemen  and  for  the  protection 
of  Dighton  Rock,  "a  valuable  historic  relic  of  American  Antiquity." 

410-411  Old  Colony  Hist.  Society.   Broadside  on  Dighton  Rock,  issued 


338  DIGHTON  ROCK 

about  1882.  — Illus,  after  no.  29c.  [411]  Photograph,  1902,  taken  by  A.  L. 
Ward  under  direction  of  J.  E.  Seaver,  sec.  of  the  society. 

412  Onffroy  de  Thoron,  Don  Enrique,  Vicomte.  Les  Pheniciens  a 
rile  d'Haiti  et  sur  le  Continent  Americain,  1889,  pp.  37-48.  Illus.,  after  no. 
18b,  p.  40.  —  Sepulchral  monument  of  a  Phoenician  adventurer  about  330 
B.  C. ;  translation  given, 

413-414  Paddack,  E.  Ink-impression  of  part  of  the  inscription,  taken 
August,  1767,  now  in  Amer.  Acad,  of  Arts  and  Sciences.  Also  ms.  letters 
describing  the  same,  Aug.  15,  1767,  Jan.  7,  1768  in  Stiles  Collection,  Yale 
University  Library. 

415-416  Palfrey,  J.  G.  Visited  the  Rock,  1857.  [416]  History  of  N. 
Eng.,  1858,  i.  56n.  —  Probably  Indian. 

Parley,  Peter.    See  S.  G.  Goodrich. 

417  Payne,  E.  J.  History  of  the  New  World  called  America,  1892,  i. 
85.  —  Not  Norse ;  quite  certain  that  it  is  Indian. 

418-420  Peabody  Museum,  Harvard  University,  Annual  Reports :  [418] 
i.  22,  6th,  1873;  [419]  ii.  13,  13th,  1876;  [420]  iii.  15,  14th,  1880.  —  Mention. 

421  Peck,  J.  T.  History  of  the  Great  Republic  considered  from  a 
Christian  Stand-Point,  1868,  p.  20.  —  Norse;  Rafn's  localities  accepted. 

422  Perry,  C.  G.  Letter  to  R.  I.  Hist.  Soc,  March  3,  1840;  in  ms. 
Correspondence  and  Reports,  iii.  68.  —  Inscriptions  near  Newport  resem- 
bling those  on  Rock. 

423-425  Peschel,  O.  Geschichte  des  Zeitalters  der  Entdeckungen,  1858. 
2te  Auflage,  1877,  p.  82.  — Norse;  follows  Rafn.  [424]  Geschichte  der 
Erdkunde,  1865,  p.  78.  —  Bancroft's  opinion.  [425]  Review  of  Gravier's 
Decouverte  de  I'Amerique  par  les  Normands.  In  Jenaer  Literaturzeitung, 
1874,  no.  17,  April  25.  —  Norse ;  follows  Rafn ;  but  mentions  dissenting 
opinions  without  comment. 

426  Peters,  A.  Ed.  note  to  Schoolcraft's  Ante-Columbian  Hist,  of 
America.  In  American  Biblical  Repository,  1839,  2nd  series,  i.  441.  —  Not 
Norse;  Indian. 

427  Petersen,  E.  History  of  Rhode  Island,  1853,  pp.  174-178.  —  Men- 
tion. 

428  Pidgeon,  W.  Traditions  of  De-Coo-Dah  and  Antiquarian  Re- 
searches, 1853,  p.  20.  —  Phoenician. 

429  PiNTARD,  J.  Letter  to  J.  Belknap,  Aug.  26,  1789.  In  Belknap 
Papers,  1891,  iii.  447.  —  Mention. 

430  Pool,  G.  L.  An  Antiquity  Discovered  in  the  Valley  of  the  Merri- 
mack. In  N.  Eng,  Hist.  Gen.  Register,  1854,  viii.  185.  —  Thinks  it  similar 
to  Rock. 

2131-432  Power,  L.  G.  Vinland.  In  Colls.  Nova  Scotia  Hist.  Soc,  1891, 
vii.  18.  —  Not  Norse.  [432]  The  Whereabouts  of  Vinland.  In  N.  Eng. 
Mag.,  1892,  N.  S.,  vii.  174.  —  Mention. 

433-435  Providence  Journal,  July  15,  1827.  Mention  of  a  just  pub- 
lished lithograph.  [434]  Dec.  2,  1869.  Editorial  comment  of  Farnum's 
paper  on  visits  of  Northmen  to  R.  I.  —  Not  Norse;  mentions  "the  merited 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  339 

ridicule  heaped  on  Dighton  Rock  and  the  Old  Stone  Mill."     [435]  July  15, 
1912.    Account  of  the  Dighton  Bi-Centennial.    Illus.,  after  no.  35. 

436  Putnam,  F.  W.    Cited  by  H.  E.  Chase  in  no.  113,  1883.  —  Indian. 

437  Putnam's  Monthly  Magazine,  1854,  iv.  467.  First  Discoverers 
of  America.  —  Norse.  The  Rock  and  the  Newport  Mill  "are  slowly  and 
surely  moulding  public  opinion  to  a  favorable  reception"  of  the  Norse 
claims. 

438  Rafinesque,  C.  S.  Ancient  History,  or  Annals  of  Kentucky;  with 
a  survey  of  the  ancient  monuments  of  North  America,  1824,  p.  35.  —  Men- 
tion of  "many  opinions." 

439-444  Rafn,  C.  C.  Antiquitates  Americanae,  1837,  pp.  xxix-xl,  his- 
torical Introduction ;  355-396,  Dighton  Rock ;  396-405,  inscribed  rocks  in 
Rhode  Island.  Illus.,  no.  17b,  Tab.  X;  nos.  Id,  2a,  Sc,  lib,  12b,  15c,  16c,  Tab. 
XI;  nos.  14e,  18b,  Tab.  XII.  — A  record  made  in  1008  by  Thorfinn  and  his 
151  companions,  original  source  of  the  Norse  theory.  [440]  America  dis- 
covered in  the  tenth  Century,  1838.  —  Mention.  [441]  Letter  to  D.  Mel- 
ville, Jan.  4,  1848.  In  Brooks's  Controversy  touching  the  Old  Stone  Mill, 
1851,  pp.  80  f;  and  in  Petersen's  Hist,  of  R.  I.,  1853,  p.  174.  — "We  must 
be  cautious  in  regard  to  the  inferences  to  be  drawn  from  .  .  .  the  early 
monuments."  [442-444]  Letters  to  N.  Arnzen  concerning  removal  of  Rock 
to  Denmark,  dated  Aug.  16,  1859;  Aug.  30,  Oct.  10,  1860;  Sept.  3,  1861.  In 
Arnzen's  Report,  Colls.  Old  Colony  Hist.  Soc.,  1895,  no.  5,  p.  95.  —  The 
Rock  is  "of  high  and  pressing  importance." 

445-446  Rau,  C.  Observations  on  the  Dighton  Rock  inscription.  In 
Mag.  of  Amer.  Hist.,  1878,  ii.  82-85.  Reprinted  in  Amer.  Antiquarian,  1878, 
i.  38,  and  in  Kansas  Review,  ii.  168.  —  Advises  caution  in  accepting  the 
Norse  theory.  [446]  Dighton  Rock  inscription,  an  opinion  of  a  Danish 
archaeologist.  In  Mag.  of  Amer.  Hist.,  1879,  iii.  236-238.  —  Worsaae's 
opinion :  Indian,  not  Norse. 

447  Reader,  A.     Archaic  Rock  Inscriptions,  1891,  pp.  64-70.  —  Indian. 

448  Reclus,  fi.  Nouvelle  Geographic  Universelle,  1890.  xv.  12.  —  Not 
Norse. 

449  Reeves,  A.  M.  Finding  of  Wineland  the  Good,  1890,  p.  97.  —  Rafn's 
theories  have  fallen  into  disfavor. 

450  Remusat,  J.  P.  A.  Letter  to  Dr.  Benj.  B.  Carter  of  New  York, 
Feb.  4,  1823.  Ms.,  owned  by  Amer,  Antiq.  Soc.  —  Indecipherable;  doubtful 
if  it  has  any  letters  or  symbolic  characters. 

451  Rhode  Island  Hist.  Society.  Drawing  by  a  committee  of  the 
Society,  about  Sept.  4,  perfected  Dec.  11,  1834,  Published,  with  conjectural 
additions  by  Rafn,  in  Antiquitates  Americanae,  1837. 

452-464  Rhode  Island  Hist.  Society.  Ms,  volumes  entitled:  Corre- 
spondence and  Reports,  vols,  i  and  ii ;  Records,  vol.  i ;  Trustees'  Records, 
vol.  i.  [452]  In  1829,  appointment  of  committee  consisting  of  Richmond 
and  Staples  to  answer  letter  from  Rafn,  [453]  1830,  addition  of  Webb  to 
committee;  replies  sent  to  Rafn,  [454]  1831,  Annual  Report,  [455]  1833, 
appointment   of    committee   on   the   antiquities    and   aboriginal    history    of 


340  DIGHTON  ROCK 

America,  consisting  of  Webb,  Bartlett,  and  Greene.  [456]  This  committee 
in  1834  made  new  drawings  of  Rock  and  sent  further  communications  to 
Rafn.  [457]  In  1835,  further  reports  of  committee,  visits  to  other  in- 
scribed rocks,  and  letters  to  Rafn.  [458-463]  1836-1841,  Annual  Reports 
mention  Rock,  measures  for  its  preservation,  importance  of  inscription  rocks, 
and  further  correspondence  with  Denmark.  [464]  Museum  catalogue,  1916, 
p.  3.  —  Not  Norse. 

465  Richmond,  W.  E.  Mount  Hope,  1818,  pp.  10-13  (verse),  43-53 
(notes).  —  Not  Indian;  probably  Egyptians,  Phoenicians  or  Carthagians,  in 
remote  antiquity. 

466  RiCKETSON,  D.  Dighton  Rock.  A  poem  in  New  Bedford  Mercury, 
May  4,  1839. 

467-468  Rider,  S.  S.  In  Book  Notes,  1888,  v.  126.  —  Mention ;  sarcastic 
review  of  Pales.     [468]  In  Book  Notes,  1892,  ix.  254  f.  —  Mention. 

469  RiVERO,  M.  E.,  and  Tschudi,  J.  J.  von.  Peruvian  Antiquities.  Trans- 
lated by  F.  L.  Hawkes,  1853,  pp.  5,  21.  —  Supposed  to  give  confirmatory 
evidence  of  the  visits  of  the  Scandinavians. 

470  RoTTiNGER,  H.  Entdeckung  Amerikas  durch  die  Normannen  im  10. 
und  11.  Jahrhundert,  1912,  p.  18.  —  "An  indisputable  proof  of  the  presence 
of  the  Northmen  in  America." 

471  Roux  DE  RocHELLE,  J.  B.  G.  fitats-Unis  d'Amerique,  1853,  pp. 
161  f .  Illus.,  no.  12b.  —  Engraved  by  ancient  American  people,  predecessors 
of  Indians. 

472-473  Royal  Society  of  London.  Ms.  Register-Book,  June  15,  1732: 
Copy  of  Greenwood's  letter  to  Eames.  [473]  Minutes,  1775.  Abstract  of 
John  Winthrop's  letter. 

474-475  Royal  Society  of  Northern  Antiquaries,  Copenhagen.  Gen- 
eral Anniversary  Meeting,  15th  February,  1851.  —  Mention.  [475]  Letter 
from  J.  J.  A.  Worsaae  and  three  other  officials  to  N.  Arnzen,  Feb.  22,  1877, 
expressing  opinion  of  society  that  figures  on  Rock  are  not  Norse,  but  In- 
dian.    Owned  by  Old  Col.  Hist.  Soc. 

476  RuGE,  S.  Entdeckungs-Geschichte  der  neuen  Welt.  In  Hamburg- 
ische  Festschrift  zur  Erinnerung  an  die  Entdeckung  Amerikas,  1892,  i.  8  f. 
— Not  Norse;  "mere  Indian  picture-scratchings." 

477  Sabin,  J.  Dictionary  of  books  relating  to  Amer.,  1879,  xi.  450. — 
Mention. 

478  Sanford,  E.    History  of  Berkley,  Mass.,  1872,  pp.  59  f.  —  Mention. 

479  Sargent,  P.  E.    Handbook  of  New  England,  1916,  p.  578.  —  Indian. 

480  Scandinavian  Memorial  Club  of  Boston,  committee  of,  visits 
Rock  Nov.  7,  1877;  includes  P.  L.  Everett,  T.  G.  Appleton,  E.  N.  Hors- 
ford,  W.  E.  Baker.     See  letter  of  Baker  to  Arnzen,  in  Old  Col.  Hist.  Soc. 

481-486  Schoolcraft,  H.  R.  Ante-Columbian  history  of  America.  In 
Amer.  Biblical  Repository,  1839,  i.  441  ff,  Illus.,  after  no.  17b,  p.  440.— 
Not  Runic.  Records  an  event  manifestly  of  importance  in  Indian  history. 
[482]  Incentives  to  the  study  of  the  Ancient  Period  of  American  History. 
Address  delivered  before  the  N.  York  Hist.  Soc.,  17th  Nov.,  1846  (1847), 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  341 

p.  10.  —  "We  are  by  no  means  sure"  that  the  localities  and  monuments  men- 
tioned by  Rafn  ever  had  any  connection  with  the  Scandinavians.  [483] 
Original  drawing  of  the  alleged  Roman  letters  in  the  central  part  of  the 
inscription,  made  in  August,  1847;  published  in  no.  484.  [484]  History  of 
the  Indian  Tribes,  1851,  i.  106-120,  125.  Illus.,  no.  23  together  with  com- 
bination of  14e  and  18b,  Plate  36,  p.  114;  and  an  analytical  Synopsis  of 
the  inscription,  Plate  2)1,  p.  119.  —  Central  characters  are  Scandinavian. 
All  the  rest  is  Indian;  Chingwauk's  interpretation  of  it  is  given.  [485] 
History  of  the  Indian  Tribes,  1854,  iv.  119  f.  Illus.,  no.  24,  Plate  14,  p. 
120.  — "It  is  entirely  Indian."  [486]  History  of  the  Indian  Tribes,  1860, 
vi.  113  f,  605,  609.  —  An  Indian  record  of  battle  between  two  tribes. 

487  Seager,  E.  Two  india-ink  drawings,  made  with  assistance  of  C.  R. 
Hale  in  1864.     Owned  by  Amer.  Antiq.   Soc. 

Seaver,  J.  E.     See  no.  411. 

488  Segrave,  F.  Sagas  Tell  of  Leif  the  Lucky's  Brave  Venture.  In 
New  Bedford  Sunday  Standard,  July  25,  1926,  Sect.  4,  pp.  31,  32.  Illus., 
no.  17b.  —  Not  Norse. 

489  Sew  all,  R.  K.  Ancient  Voyages  to  the  Western  Continent,  1895, 
pp.  12,  23.  —  "Deighton  Rock  and  Monhegan  .  .  .  are  possible  footprints 
not  of  Northman  visits  alone  but  of   Phoenician  adventure  here." 

490  Sewall,  Samuel.  Letter-Book  (1886),  i.  116.  Memorandum  of 
Febr.  24,  1691.  — Mention. 

491-493  Sewall,  Stephen.  Author  of  drawing  of  Sept.  13,  1768. 
Owned  by  Peabody  Museum.  [492]  Ms.  letter  to  E.  Stiles,  Jan.  13,  1769. 
In  Stiles  Collection,  Yale  University  Library.  —  Indian ;  without  signifi- 
cance. [493]  Letter  to  Court  de  Gebelin,  1781,  accompanying  copy  of  his 
drawing.     In  Gebelin's  Monde  Primitif,  1781,  viii.  58  f. 

494  Shaffner,  T.  P.  History  of  the  U.  S.,  n.  d.  [about  1862].— 
Norse. 

495  Shea,  J.  G.  Introd.  to  C.  G.  Herberman's  transl.  of  Torfason's 
Hist,  of  Ancient  Vinland,  1891,  p.  iv.  —  Not  Norse. 

496  Shipley,  J.  B.,  and  M.  A.  English  Rediscovery  and  Colonization 
of  America,  1891,  p.  7.  —  No  direct  mention;  but  Vinland  was  Rhode  Island 
and  Massachusetts,  and  "traces  of  their  long-continued  presence  have  been 
found  ...  in  various  parts  of  New  England." 

497  Short,  J.  T.  Claims  to  the  discovery  of  America.  In  Galaxy, 
1875,  XX.  517.  — Not  Norse;  Indian. 

498-500  Shove,  G.  A.  Lithograph  of  Rock,  1864.  Made  also  many 
other  drawings  and  paintings  of  Rock,  much  resembling  the  lithograph, 
[499]  Dighton.  Chapter  xix  in  Hurd's  History  of  Bristol  County,  Mass., 
1883,  pp.  250  f.  Illus.,  after  no.  29c.  —  Probably  not  Norse;  little  opposition 
to  the  Indian  view.  [500]  Toast  to  "The  South  Purchase."  In  Quarter 
Millennial  Celebration  of  Taunton,  Mass.,  June  4  and  5,  1889.  —  Mention. 

501  Sibley,  J.  L.  Description  of  the  restoration  of  the  Sewall  drawing 
in  1860.    Ms.,  attached  to  the  original  drawing,  in  the  Peabody  Museum. 


342  DIGHTON  ROCK 

502-503  SiNDiNG,  P.  C.  History  of  Scandinavia,  1858.  [503]  Scan- 
dinavian Races,  1876,  p.  84.  —  Norse;  accepts  Rafn's  opinions. 

504-505  Slade,  E.     Letters  describing  Rock,  Dec.   17,   1875,   March  13, 

1876.  In  R.  B.  Anderson's  America  not  discovered  by  Columbus,  2nd  ed. 

1877,  p.  21,  33.  — Not  Indian. 

506  Slade,  W.  A.  King  Philip  Country.  In  N.  Eng.  Mag.,  1898,  xxiv. 
609.  Illus.,  after  no.  29c,  p.  606.  —  Has  some  value  as  evidence  for  Norse 
visits. 

507-508  Slafter,  E.  F.  Voyages  of  the  Northmen  to  America  (Prince 
Society),  1877,  pp.  11,  132-134,  137,  140.  — There  is  left  no  trace  of  belief 
in  Norse  origin  of  Rock  and  Nevi^port  mill  "in  the  minds  of  distinguished 
antiquaries  and  historians."  [508]  Discovery  of  America  by  the  Northmen, 
985-1015.  Discourse  delivered  before  N.  Hamp.  Hist.  Soc,  April  24,  1888. 
Also  read  before  Bostonian  Society,  Dec.  10,  1889.  In  Proc.  N.  Hamp. 
Hist.  Soc,  ii;  and  in  Granite  Monthly,  1890,  xiii.  201  f.  Separate  reprint, 
1891.  — Indian. 

509  Smibert,  J.     Drawing  of  Rock,  about  1729,  not  novir  discoverable. 

510-511  Smith,  B.  Paper  on  Rock.  Abstract  in  Proc.  Amer.  Antiq. 
Soc,  April  29,  1863,  p.  31.  —  Inscription  by  a  Roman  Catholic  missionary, 
about  1520.  [511]  Ms.  letter  to  J.  R.  Bartlett,  July  14,  1864.  In  Letter- 
Book  of  J.  R.  Bartlett,  in  John  Carter  Brown  Library. 

512  Smith,  J.  V.  C.  Letter  on  Rock  and  Fall  River  skeleton,  June  15, 
1842.  In  Memoires  de  la  Societe  Royale  des  Antiquaires  du  Nord,  1840- 
1844,  p.  116. 

513  Smith,  John.  Ms.  letter  to  E.  Stiles,  July  25,  1789,  describing 
the  making  of  the  drawing  by  himself.  Dr.  Baylies  and  others.  In  Stiles 
Collection,  Yale  University  Library.  —  Queries  if  it  may  not  be  Asiatic. 

514  Smith,  Joshua  T.  Northmen  in  New  England  or  America  in  the 
Tenth  Century,  Boston,  1839,  pp.  310-328.  London  editions  of  1839  and 
1842  bear  title:  Discovery  of  America  by  the  Northmen  in  the  tenth  cen- 
tury. —  An  exposition  and  defence  in  dialogue  form  of  Rafn's  opinions. 

515  Society  of  Antiquaries  of  London.  Ms.  Minutes,  ii.  2;  Nov.  9, 
1732.  —  Copy  of  Greenwood's  letter  to  Fames. 

516  Spence,  L.  Myths  of  N.  American  Indians,  1914,  p.  16.  —  Not 
Norse;  Indian. 

517  Spofford,  a.  R.  Library  of  Historic  Characters  and  Famous 
Events.     Edited  by  A.  R.  Spofford  and  Others,  1895,  i.  108.  —  Not  Norse. 

518-519  Squier,  E.  G.  Ms.  letters  to  J.  R.  Bartlett,  Nov.  7,  1846,  Jan. 
24,  1847.    In  Letter-Book  of  J.  R.  Bartlett,  in  John  Carter  Brown  Library. 

—  Indian  inscriptions  resembling  that  of  Dighton  Rock. 

520  Squier,  E.  G.,  and  Davis,  E.  H.  Ancient  Monuments  of  the  Miss- 
issippi Valley.     Smithsonian  Contributions  to  Knowledge,  1847,  i.  298,  300. 

—  Indian. 

521-523  Squier,  E.  G.  Alleged  Monumental  Evidence  of  the  Discovery 
of  America  by  the  Northmen,  Critically  Examined.  In  Brit.  Ethnol.  Jour- 
nal, December,  1848.     Reprinted  in  the  National  Intelligencer,   March  27, 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  343 

1849,  p.  2/1-3.  —  Not  Norse.  The  conclusion  is  irresistible  that  this  rock 
is  a  true  Indian  monument  and  has  no  extraordinary  significance.  [522] 
Observations  on  Memoir  of  Dr.  Zesterman.  Reprint  from  Proc.  Amer. 
Ethnolog.  Soc,  1851,  p.  20.  [523]  Ancient  Monuments  of  the  U.  S.  In 
Harper's  Mag.,  1860,  xx.  738.  —  Indian. 

524  Standard  Dictionary.  Ed.  1903,  p.  2242,  mention;  ed.  1913,  no 
mention. 

525  Stark,  J.  Antiquities  of  North  America.  In  Amer.  Monthly  Mag., 
1836,  N.  S.,  i.  71 ;  and  in  Amer.  Mag.  of  Useful  and  Entertaining  Knowl- 
edge, 1837,  iii.  433.  —  No  sufficient  explanation  yet  given;  believes  it  Phoe- 
nician. 

526-529  Stiles,  E.  Drawings  of  Rock:  June  6,  July  15,  1767,  in  his  Ms. 
Itinerary,  ii.  273-283,  in  Yale  University  Library;  [528]  July  16,  1767, 
owned  by  Mass.  Hist.  Soc. ;   [529]  Oct.  3,  1788,  not  preserved. 

530  Stiles,  E.  Ms.  letter  to  John  Winthrop,  June  15,  1767.  In  Stiles 
Collection,  Yale  University  Library,  —  Mention. 

531-534  Stiles,  E.  Descriptions  and  drawings  of  Rock  and  other  in- 
scribed rocks,  1767,  1768,  1783,  1788,  in  his  ms.  Itineraries,  in  Stiles  Collec- 
tion, Yale  University  Library,  ii.  245,  265  f,  272-315,  333,  345,  347,  351  f; 
iii.  600;  iv.  251,  254  f. 

535  Stiles,  E.  Itineraries  and  Correspondence,  1916,  p.  234.  —  Visit  to 
the  Rock  of  June  5  and  6,  1767. 

536  Stiles,  E.  The  United  States  elevated  to  Glory  and  Honor.  A 
Sermon,  Preached  May  8th,  1783,  pp.  11   ff.  —  Phoenician. 

537  Stiles,  E.  Account  of  two  Inscriptions  upon  Rocks  in  Kent  and 
Washington  in  the  Western  Part  of  the  State  of  Connecticut,  taken  off  1789 
by  Ezra  Stiles,  and  by  him  communicated  to  the  Acady  of  Arts  &  Sciences, 
June  8,  1790.  Ms.  owned  by  Amer.  Acad,  of  Arts  and  Sciences.  —  Con- 
tains extended  discussion  of  Dighton  Rock  as  a  Phoenician  inscription. 

538-541  Stiles,  E.  Literary  Diary,  1901,  [538]  i.  20,  1782;  [539]  i.  72, 
1783;   [540]  i.  330,  1788;   [541]  i.  402,  1790.  — Mention. 

542  Stone,  E.  M.  Report  of  the  Northern  Department,  Jan.  21,  1873. 
In  Proc.  R.  I.  Hist.  Soc,  1872-3.  —  Mention. 

543  SvEiNSON,  Dr.  Cited  by  Fischer,  in  his  Discoveries  of  the  Norse- 
men in  America,  1903,  p.  43.  —  Not  Norse. 

544  SwEETSER,  M.  F.     New  England,  1873,  p.  39.  — Mention. 

545  Sylvester,  H.  M.  Indian  Wars  of  New  England,  1910,  i.  28-30, 
note.  —  Not  Indian ;  possibly  Phoenician,  "Its  antiquity  is  more  remote, 
possibly,  than  as  yet  has  been  accorded  it." 

546  Tallman,  M.  M.    Pleasant  Places  in  R.  I.,  1892,  p.  70,  —  Mention. 

547  Taunton,  Mass,  Quarter  Millennial  Celebration  of,  June  4  and  5, 
1889,  pp,  141,  opp,  179, 

548  Taunton  Daily  Gazette,  Jan.  11,  1902,  p.  6/4.  Sketches  of  Taun- 
ton History,  second  paper.  —  Norse  theory  possible,  but  not  proved. 

549  Taunton  Men,  probable  inscribers  on  Rock,  about  1640. 


344  DIGHTON  ROCK 

550  Taunton  Whig,  Jan.  23,  1839,  p.  2/3-5.  Dighton  Rock.  —  Phoe- 
nician. 

551  Taylor,  J.  L.  American  Antiquities.  In  Bibliotheca  Sacra,  1855, 
xii.  460.  —  Mention. 

552  Thacher,  —  .  Probably  wrote  name  on  Rock,  1592. 

553-554  Thomas,  C.  Catalogue  of  Prehistoric  Works  East  of  the 
Rocky  Mountains.  Bureau  of  Amer.  Ethnology,  Bulletin  12,  1891.  —  Does 
not  include  Dighton  Rock.  [554]  Dighton  Rock.  In  Handbook  of  Ameri- 
can Indians  North  of  Mexico,  1907,  i.  390  f .     Illus.,  after  no.  33.  —  Indian. 

555  Tucker,  C.  R.     Photograph,  1903. 

556  Universal  Cyclopedia  and  Atlas,  1901.  —  Indian. 

557  Vail,  E.  A.  Notice  sur  les  Indiens  de  I'Amerique  du  Nord,  1840, 
pp.  36  f .  —  Mention ;  quotes  Jomard's  opinion. 

558  Vallancey,  C.  Observations  on  the  American  Inscription.  Read 
Feb.  9,  1786.  In  Archaeologia,  1787,  viii.  302-3.  — Made  by  Scythians  of 
Siberia. 

559  Vetromile,  E.  Abnaki  Indians.  In  Colls.  Maine  Hist.  Soc,  1859, 
vi.  223.  —  Indian. 

560  ViGNAUD,  H.  Expeditions  des  Scandinaves  en  Amerique  devant  la 
critique.  Un  nouveau  faux  document.  Extrait  du  Journal  de  la  Societe 
des  Americanistes  de  Paris,  nouvelle  serie,  1910,  vii.  21-24.  —  Not  Norse; 
Indian. 

Ward,  A.  L.     Photographer  of  no.  35,  1902. 

561  Warden,  D.  B.  Recherches  sur  les  Antiquites  des  fitats-Unis  de 
I'Amerique  septentrionale.  In  Recueil  de  Voyages  et  de  Memoires,  public 
par  la  Societe  de  Geographie,  1825,  ii.  375,  438  f,  505.  Illus.,  no.  12b.— 
Non-committal. 

562  Washington,  G.  Remarks  on  seeing  drawing  by  James  Winthrop 
in  Museum  of  Harvard  College  in  Oct.,  1789.  Cited  by  J.  Lathrop  in  letter 
to  J.  Davis,  Aug.  10,  1809.  In  Proc.  Mass.  Hist.  Soc,  1869,  x.  114.— 
Indian. 

563  Watson,  P.  B.  Bibliography  of  the  pre-Columbian  discoveries  of 
America.  In  Library  Journal,  1881,  vi.  227-244.  Reprinted  in  R.  B.  Ander- 
son's America  not  discovered  by  Columbus,  3rd  ed.,  1883.  —  Mention. 

564  Webb,  T.  H.  Authority  for  a  daguerreotype  made  in  1840.  In  Ms. 
letters  to  J.  Ordronaux,  May  9  and  27,  1854,  owned  by  Old  Colony  Hist. 
Soc. 

565-568  Webb,  T.  H.  Letters  to  Rafn.  In  Antiquitates  Americanse. 
[565]  Sept.  22,  1830,  pp.  356-361 ;  [566]  Nov.  30,  1834,  pp.  361-371 ;  [567] 
Sept.  14,  1835;  pp.  397-399;  [568]   Oct.  31,  1835,  pp.  400-404. 

569-570  Webb,  T.  H.  Letters  to  Christopher  Dunkin,  1834,  requesting 
copy  of  Sewall  drawing.  In  ms.  Correspondence  and  Reports,  R.  I.  Hist. 
Soc,  ii.  22,  25. 

571  Webb,  T.  H.  Ms.  letter  to  J.  R.  Bartlett,  Feb.  4,  1838.  In  Letter- 
Book  of  J.  R.  Bartlett,  in  John  Carter  Brown  Library, 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  345 

572  Webb,  T.  H.  Ms.  letter  to  J.  Ordronaux,  May  9  and  27,  1854. 
Owned  by  Old  Colony  Hist.  Soc.  —  Norse. 

573  Webb,  T.  H.  Communication  on  Rafn.  In  Proc.  Mass.  Hist.  Soc, 
1865,  viii.  175-201. 

574  Weise,  a.  J.  Discoveries  of  America  to  the  year  1525,  1884,  p.  42. 
—  Not  Norse. 

575  Weslauff,  E.  W.,  President  R.  S.  N.  A.  Letter  to  R.  I.  Hist. 
Soc,  May  30,  1838.  In  ms.  Records,  Annual  Report,  July  19,  1838;  and 
in  ms.     Correspondence  and  Reports,  iii.  23. 

576  Whipple,  J.  Cited  by  T.  H.  Webb,  in  letter  to  J.  R.  Bartlett,  Feb. 
4,  1838.  —  No  inscription ;  marks  due  to  natural  processes  only. 

577  Whittlesey,  C.  Rock  Inscriptions  in  the  United  States.  In  West- 
ern Reserve  Hist.  Soc.  Tracts,  no.  42,  March,  1878,  p.  41.  —  Indian. 

578-579  Wilbur,  G.  K.  Colored  Post  Cards  of  Dighton  Rock  [1913], 
and  Prospectus  of  Dighton  Rock  Park.  —  Norse. 

580-581  Wilder,  H.  H.  Petroglyph  from  Eastern  Massachusetts.  In 
Amer.  Anthropologist,  1911,  N.  S.,  xiii.  65-67.  —  Indian.  [581]  Man's 
Prehistoric  Past,  1923,  pp.  362,  363n,  370n.  Illus.,  no.  43b.  See  also  no. 
156o. 

582  Wilhelmi,  K.  Island,  Hvitramannaland,  Gronland  und  Vinland 
Oder  der  Normanner  Leben  auf  Island  und  Gronland  und  dehren  Fahrten 
nach  Amerika  schon  uber  500  Jahre  vor  Columbus,  1842,  pp.  228-230.  — 
Norse;  follows  Rafn. 

583  Williams,  H.  S.,  editor.  Historians  History  of  the  World,  1908, 
vol.  xxii.  pt.  xxiii.  bk.  i.  ch.  i.  p.  398.  —  Indian. 

584-586  Wilson,  Sir  D.  Prehistoric  Man,  1862,  ii.  172-178.  —  Indian. 
[585]  Vinland  of  the  Northmen.  In  Proc.  and  Trans.  Royal  Soc.  of 
Canada  for  1890,  vol.  viii.  sect.  ii.  pp.  113  f,  116,  120.  — Not  Norse  [586] 
Lost  Atlantis  and  other  Ethnographic  Studies,  1892,  pp.  46  f,  54,  61,  206.  — 
Not  Norse;  Indian. 

587  WiNSOR,  J.  Pre-Columbian  Explorations.  In  Narr.  and  Crit.  Hist, 
of  America,  1889,  i.  101-104.  Illus.,  no.  17b,  p.  101;  nos.  Id,  2a,  5c,  lib, 
12b,  15c,  16c,  p.  103.  — Indian. 

588-589  WiNTHROP,  James.  Ink-impression  of  the  inscription,  reduced 
by  pantograph,  made  Aug.  14,  1788.  [589]  Account  of  an  inscribed  rock, 
at  Dighton,  accompanied  by  a  copy  of  the  inscriptions.  In  Memoirs  Amer, 
Acad,  of  Arts  and  Sciences,  1804,  vol.  ii.  pt.  ii.  pp.  126-129.  Dated  Nov. 
10,  1788.  Illus.,  no.  12b.  —  Description  of  Rock  and  of  making  the  ink- 
impression. 

590-591  WiNTHROP,  John.  Imperfect  drawing  of  the  inscription,  about 
1744,  not  preserved.  [591]  Letter  to  Timothy  Hollis,  spring  of  1774,  trans- 
mitting copy  of  Sewall's  drawing.  Quoted  by  M.  Lort,  in  Archaeologia, 
1787,  viii.  295.  —  Indian. 

592  Worcester,  J.  E.  Geographical  Dictionary  or  Universal  Gazetteer, 
1817,  i,  under  "Dighton."  —  No  satisfactory  explanation. 


346 


DIGHTON  ROCK 


593  WoRSAAE,  J.  J.  A.  Dighton  Rock  inscription,  an  opinion  of  a  Dan- 
ish archaeologist.  In  a  letter  to  Rau,  Nov.  1,  1878,  in  Mag.  of  Amer.  His- 
tory, 1879,  iii.  236-238.  —  Not  Norse;  Indian.     See  also  no.  475. 

594  Wyman,  J.  Remarks  on  Stone  Implements  of  the  Indians.  In 
Proc.  Boston  Soc.  of  Nat.  History,  Dec.  2,  1868,  1868-69,  xii.  218.  —  Indian. 

Yates,  J.  V.  N.    See  Moulton,  J.  W. 

595  Young,  G.  M.  Dighton  Rock;  compiled  and  written  for  the  Peoria 
Scientific  Association,  October,  1890.  In  Peoria  Journal.  —  Inclines  to 
Phoenician  theory.  A  photograph  that  he  claims  to  have  made  in  1890  was 
a  copy  of  no.  29c. 

596-597  Youth's  Companion,  March  18,  1920,  cover.  —  Reference  to 
Norsemen,  and  "a  rock  mysteriously  carved,  a  myth,  a  local  legend."  [597J 
Jan.  27,  1927,  p.  72.    A  Message  from  the  Past. 


B.  CHRONOLOGICAL  SEQUENCE  OF  ITEMS  IN  A 


1511: 

124 

1786: 

342  558 

1833: 

455 

1592: 

552 

1787: 

235 

1834: 

45  178  179  262 

1640: 

549 

1788: 

59  60  286  381 

451  456  566  569 

1680: 

128 

529  534  540  588 

570 

1690: 

365 

1789: 

53  54  61 

1835: 

457  567  568 

1691: 

367  490 

429  513  562 

1836: 

9   228  458  525 

1703: 

366 

1790: 

189  343  537  541 

1837: 

129  260  355  439 

1712: 

368 

1796: 

5 

459 

1714: 

369  371 

1798: 

302 

1838: 

32  33    80  130 

1720: 

399 

1804: 

589 

190  192  211  212 

1721: 

370 

1807: 

62  269  322  380 

214  384  440  460 

1729: 

63  509 

1809: 

134  323  324  334 

571  575  576 

1730: 

246  247 

1810: 

311 

1839: 

1   42  112  115 

1732: 

248  472  515 

1812: 

229 

255  281  320  426 

1744: 

590 

1814: 

311 

461  466  481  514 

1747: 

168 

1816: 

372  378 

550 

1766: 

114 

1817: 

8   592 

1840: 

38  43  221  223 

1767: 

413  526  527  528 

1818: 

465 

422  462  557  564 

530  531 

1819: 

314  402  403 

1841 

39  55  81  107 

1768 

414  491  532 

1820: 

191 

175  316  463 

1769. 

492 

1821: 

388 

1842 

512  582 

1774 

591 

1822: 

106 

1843 

351 

1775 

473 

1823: 

450 

1844 

251  292  331 

1779 

358 

1824 

174  204  389  438 

1845 

7   216  318  360 

1781 

125  180  217  319 

1825 

561 

1846 

46  282  405  482 

493 

1827 

27  433 

518 

1782 

31  538 

1829 

121  452 

1847 

19  67  483  519 

1783 

533  536  539 

1830 

52  453  565 

520 

1784 

58  284  285 

1831 

297  454 

1848 

77    184  187  239 

BIBLIOGRAPHIES 


347 


301  346  Z72,  395 

1875: 

2   171  231  243 

1899: 

396  441  521 

270  288  382  497 

1900: 

1849: 

104  354 

504 

1901: 

1850: 

11  110  119  271 

1876: 

40  69  75  94 

344 

99  328  332  345 

1902: 

1851: 

93  474  484  522 

398  419  503  505 

1852: 

4   65  335 

1877: 

197  198  264  265 

1903: 

1853: 

79  182  207  283 

409  475  480  507 

293  427  428  469 

1878: 

16  445  577  593 

471 

1879: 

383  446  477 

1904: 

1854: 

222  430  437  485 

1880: 

20  70  161  162 

572 

165  166  193  376 

1905: 

1855: 

551 

391  420 

1906: 

1856: 

273 

1881: 

84  309  352  377 

1907: 

1857: 

87  100  185  415 

563 

1858: 

253  263  279  329 

1882: 

138  199  294  295 

1908: 

416  423  502 

321  394  410 

1909: 

1859: 

26  181  442  559 

1883: 

113  287  312  339 

1910: 

1860: 

88  167  220  443 

349  350  392  408 

1911: 

486  501  523 

436  499 

1912: 

1861: 

22  89  218  3Z6 

1884: 

118  127  169  172 

386  444 

574 

1913: 

1862: 

23  347  494  584 

1885: 

72  170 

1914: 

1863: 

274  510 

1886: 

86  232  299 

1915: 

1864: 

47  57  76    98 

1887: 

49  7Z    258  305 

256  275  359  487 

356 

1916: 

498  511 

1888: 

21  24  105  116 

1865: 

68  254  348  361 

195  240  467  508 

424  573 

1889: 

25  50  90  117 

1917: 

1866: 

173  194 

266  412  500  547 

1918: 

1867: 

137  186  210  244 

587 

1919: 

276 

1890: 

6   227  280  330 

1868: 

85  101  139  140 
245  421  594 

406  448  449  585 
595 

1920: 

1869: 

74  141  164  197 

1891: 

78  431  447  495 

1921 : 

225  362  434 

496  553 

1922: 

1870: 

82  267 

1892: 

126  176  208  226 

1871 

257  277 

234  289  353  379 

1923: 
1924: 

1872: 

37  123  142  306 

417  432  468  476 

478 

546  586 

1873: 

48  135  199  215 

1893 

51  131  357 

1925: 

230  2,26  397  418 

1894: 

18  83  132  133 

542  544 

1895 

401  489  517 

1926: 

1874 

13  44  238  242 

1896 

401 

338  340  385  393 

1897 

41  111  136 

1927: 

425 

1898 

64  92  310  506 

1928: 

196 

108  122  160 

56  252  268  317 
374  556 

205  300  32,2,  404 
411  548 

28  91  201  22>Z 
250  290  524  543 
555 

3  15  30  36 
298  375 

109  296 
200  2,27  387 

14  177  206  249 
272  400  554 
17  102  183  583 
209  291  325  390 
202  545  560 
188  200o  383  580 
12  163  224  435 
470 

34  578  579 
308  516 

95  96  103  143 
237  315 

71  97  241  259 
278  303  227  464 
479  535 

29  66  144  261 
145  213 

120  146  147  148 

304 

149  150  156o 

1566313  363  596 

35  151 

152  153  156c 

364 

154  157  236  581 

10  313a 

149a 155  158 

203 

219  307  341  407 

488 

597 

159 


348  DIGHTON  ROCK 

C.  PARTIAL  BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  NEW  ENGLAND 
PETROGLYPHS 

Mote. — "See  A"  means:  refer  to  Bibliography  A  for  fuller  title. 

Andree,  R.  Ethnographische  Parallelen,   1878,  i.  260,  294-297. 
Antiquitates   Americanse,   1837.     See  A,   under   Raf n.  —  Scaticook,   Ports- 
mouth, Tiverton,  Gardner's  Point. 
Arnold,  James  N.     See  A. 

Babcock,  W.  H.     See  A.  —  Mount  Hope,  Portsmouth,  Arnold's  Point. 

Bacon,  E.  M.     See  A.  —  Mount  Hope,  Portsmouth. 

Baker,  V.    Massasoit's  Town,  1904,  p.  36  f.  —  Penobscot  visits  to  Warren, 

King's  Rocks. 
Baxter,  J.  P.     See  A,  Early  Voyages,  p.   17.  —  Boys  at  play. 
Belknap,  J.     History  of  Nevir  Hampshire,  1813,  iii.  65  ff.  —  Trees  in  New 

Hampshire. 
Bicknell,  T.  W.     (a)  History  of  Barrington,  1898,  p.  22.     (b)  Lief's  Rock 

at  Bristol.    In  Bristol  Phenix,  June  6,  1919,  p.  1. 
Bradford,  A.  W.     See  A. 
Brinton,  D.  G.     The  Archaeologist    (Waterloo,   Indiana),   1893,  i.  201.— 

Long  Island  tablet.     See  also  A. 

Cabot,  Mary  R.    Annals  of  Brattleboro,  1921,  i.  4  f.  — West  River. 

Chase,  H.  E.    See  A. 

Crockett,  W.  H.    History  of  Vermont,  1921,  i.  46. 

Dedicatory  Exercises  of  Mount  Hope  rock,  June  13,  1919  (T.  W.  Bicknell, 
J.  R.  Edwards,  M.  A.  Cheesman,  J.  H.  Bailey). 

(a)  Bristol  Phenix,  June  10  and  17,  1919,  p.  1. 

(b)  Providence  Journal,  June  14,  1919,  p.  10,  col.  1,  2. 
Delabarre,  E.  B.     See  A. 

Diman,  J.  L.     (Mount  Hope  rock). 

(a)  Annals  of  Bristol.    In  Bristol  Phenix,  May  31,  1845,  p.  2,  col.  3,  4. 

(b)  Review  of  De  Costa.    In  North  American  Review,  1869,  cix.  266. 

(c)  Editorial  in  Providence  Journal,  Oct.  4,  1879,  p.  2,  col.  2. 

(d)  The  Settlement  of  Mount  Hope.  Historical  Address  at  the  Bi- 
centennial of  Bristol,  R.  I.,  Sept.  24,  1880.  Published  in  (1)  Provi- 
dence Journal,  Sept.  24,  1880;  (2)  Bi-Centennial  of  Bristol,  1881; 
(3)   Diman's  Orations  and  Essays,   1882,  p.   146. 

(e)  Notice  of  Miller's  Wampanoag  Tribes.  In  Providence  Journal, 
Nov.  19,  1880,  p.  2,  col.  2. 

Drisko,  G.  W.     Narrative  of  Town  of  Machias,   1904. 

Ewbank,  T.    See  A. 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  349 

Fales,  Ernest.  History  of  the  Northmen's  Visits  to  Rhode  Island  and 
Massachusetts  in  the  Tenth  Century.  Chapter  IV:  The  Mount  Hope 
Rock.  —  An   illiterate  pamphlet,   pretentious,   ignorant,   but   interesting. 

Finch,  John.     See  A. 

Fowke,  G.    In  Handbook  of  American  Indians  (see  below),  i.  610. 

Ganong,  W.  F.  Le  Clercq's  New  Relation  of  Gaspesia,  1910,  Introduction. 
—  Micmac  writing. 

Goodwin,  J.  A.     See  A. 

Gordon,  G.  B.  The  Double  Axe  and  Some  Other  Symbols.  In  Museum 
Journal  of  the  Univ.  of  Penn.,  1915,  vi.  46-68;  also  in  W.  K.  Moore- 
head,  Stone  Ornaments,  1917,  Zdl-in, 

Green,  S.  A.  Remarks  on  sculptured  rocks  in  Rhode  Island  lately  visited. 
In  Proc.  Amer.  Antiq.  Soc,  Oct.  21,  1868,  p.  13. 

Hall,  Benj.  H.     History  of  Eastern  Vermont,  1858,  pp.  587-592. 

Hamlin,  A.  C.  Supposed  Runic  Inscriptions.  In  Proc.  Amer.  Assoc,  for 
the  Adv.  of  Science,  10th  Meeting,  Albany,  1856,  pp.  214  f.  —  Mon- 
hegan. 

Handbook  of  American  Indians  north  of  Mexico.  Bureau  of  Amer. 
Ethnology,  Bulletin  30,  2  vols.,  1907,  1910.  —  See  articles  on  Arch- 
aeology, Banner  Stones,  Cup  Stones,  Engraving,  Graphic  Art,  In- 
scribed Tablets,  Pictographs,  Popular  Fallacies,  Sign  Language,  Tat- 
tooing, Totems. 

Harper's  Encyclopaedia  of  United  States  History,  1905,  x.  76.  —  Mount 
Hope. 

Haven,  S.  F.    See  A. 

Henshaw,  H.  W.     In  Handbook  of  Amer.  Indians   (see  above),  il.  242  f. 

Higginson,  T.  W.     See  A.  —  Mount  Hope. 

Holland,  W.  J.     See  A. 

Holmes,  W.  H.  (a)  Handbook  of  Amer.  Indians  (see  above),  i.  7,  75, 
504. 

(b)  Handbook   of   Aboriginal   Antiquities.     Part   I.     The   Lithic   In- 
dustries.    Bureau  of  Amer.  Ethnol.,  Bull.  60,  1919,  pp.  xv.  101. 

Howe,  Rt.  Rev.  Mark  A.  DeW.,  Historical  Poem.  In  Bi-Centennial  of 
Bristol,  1881,  pp.  54,  60. 

Howley,  J.  P.    The  Beothuck  or  Red  Indians,  p.  249. 

Kendall,  E.  A.  See  A;  also  Travels,  iii.  223-235.  —  Portsmouth,  Tiverton, 
Rutland,  Bellows  Falls,  West  River,  Weathersfield. 

Lang,  A.     Magic  and  Religion,  1901,  p,  241.  —  Cup  stones. 

Mallery,  G.  Picture-writing  of  the  American  Indians.  In  Tenth  Ann. 
Rep.  Bureau  of  Amer.  Ethnol.  for  1888-89,  pp.  81  (Machias),  189-200 
(Cup  Sculptures),  666    (Cherokee  Syllabary),  759    (Monhegan). 


350  DIGHTON  ROCK 

Miller,  W.  J.     (Mount  Hope  rock). 

(a)  Notes  Concerning  the  Wampanoag  Tribe  of  Indians,  with  some 
account  of  a  Rock  Picture  on  the  shore  of  Mount  Hope  Bay,  in  Bristol, 
R.  I.,  1880,  pp.  6-10,  119.  — A  paper  read  before  the  R.  I.  Hist.  Soc, 
on  March  17,  1874. 

(b)  King  Philip  and  the  Wampanoags  of  Rhode  Island,  1885.  —  A 
re-issue  of    (a). 

(c)  Celebration  of  the  Two-Hundredth  Anniversary  of  the  Settle- 
ment of  the  Town  of  Bristol.  R.  I.,  Sept.  24,  1880,  (Bi-Centennial  of 
Bristol).  Compiled  by  William  J.  Miller,  1881.  —  Notes  to  the  His- 
torical Poem,  pp.  65  ff,  may  have  been  written  by  Miller. 

(d)  Comments  on  Higginson's  Visit  of  the  Vikings.  In  Bristol 
Phenix,  Aug.  26,  1882,  p.  2,  col.  4,  5. 

Moorehead,  W.  K.     Stone  Ornaments  of  the  American  Indian,   1917,  pp. 

194  f,  367  f,  371,  Zll ,  421.  —  Banner  stones. 
Munro,   W.   H.      (a)  The   History   of    Bristol,   R.    I.     The    Story   of   the 

Mount  Hope  Lands.     1880,  pp.  388  f. 

(b)  Picturesque  Rhode  Island,  1881,  pp.  11,  79. 

(c)  Some  Legends  of  Mount  Hope.  Printed  for  private  circulation, 
1915,  pp.  7-13. 

(d)  Tales  of  an  Old  Sea  Port,  1917,  pp.  1-9. 

Ober,  Andrew  K.  In  Beverly  Citizen,  Sept.  14  and  21,  1889;  also  issued 
as  a  broadside.  —  Drawings  and  descriptions  of  supposed  Norse  in- 
scriptions from  Beverly,  Mass.,  and  elsewhere. 

Pool,  G.  L.    See  A.  —  West  Newbury. 

Rafn,  C.  C.     See  A. 

Reader,  A.  Archaic  Rock  Inscriptions;  an  Account  of  the  Cup  and  Ring 
Markings  on  the  Sculptured  Stones  of  the  Old  and  New  Worlds.   1891. 

Schoolcraft,    H.   R.     History   of   the   Indian   Tribes,    1860,    vi.   604-610.— 

Vermont,   Monhegan. 
Slade,  W.  A.     See  A.  —  Mount  Hope. 
Squier,  E.  G.     See  A.  —  Portsmouth,  Tiverton. 

Stiles,  E.     See  A.  —  Portsmouth,   Fogland,   Newport,  Tiverton,   Scaticook. 
Stone,   G,   H.     The   Inscription   Rocks   on   the    Island   of    Monhegan.     In 

Science,  1885,  vi.  124. 

Tylor,  E.  B.  Early  History  of  Mankind,  1878,  Chapter  V:  Picture- 
Writing. 

Vetromile,  E.    Abnaki  Indians.     In  Coll.  Maine  Hist.  Soc,  1859,  vi.  223  ff. 

—  Abnaki   ideographic   writing,   of   early   native   origin. 
Vignaud,  H.     See  A. 


BIBLIOGRAPHIES  351 

Wilder,  H.  H.    See  A.  —  West  Wrentham. 
Williams,  Samuel.    History  of  Vermont,  2nd  ed.,  1809,  i.  206  f. 
Williamson,  H.  D.     History  of  Maine,  1832,  ii.  385.  —  Machias. 
Winsor,  J,    See  A. 

Wright,   O.   A.     History   of    Swansea,    1917,   pp.   238    f .  —  Maker   Farm, 
King's  Rocks. 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Note. — Names  appearing  alphabetically  in  the  Bibliography  are  not  included 

in  the  Index, 


Aall,  Jacob  149,  150 

Abbott,  Katherine  M.  158 

Abnaki  Indians  269,  306.     5"^^  also 

Micmac ;  Penobscot. 
Acushnet  280 
Adet,  Pierre  A.  68,  127 
Aegypto-Drostic  104,  144 
Agard,  C.  A.  160 
Agrippa.    See  Furnius. 
Aki  235 
Almy,  Job,  of  Portsmouth  205,  213, 

220 
Job,  of  Tiverton  229 
John  191,   196,  197,  224,  229 
Leon  F.  227,  228 
William  205,  231,  232 
Alphabet,  development  of  9,  10 
Alphabetic  characters  on  the  rocks 

25,  53,  59,  67,  69,  70,  72,  82,  90, 

94,  96,  103,  105,  113,  124,   130, 

131,  132,  145,  169,  170,  171,  181, 

182,  184,  188,  195,  198,  199,  200, 

202,  234,  256,  257 
Amazon,  Phoenician  voyages  to  129, 

148,  149,  150 
American    Academy    of    Arts    and 

Sciences  54,  61,  66,  69,  261,  263 
American  Antiquarian  Society  154 
American  Monthly  Magazine  280 
American  Whig  141 
Amherst   College.     See  Gilbert 

Museum. 
An,  son  of  Thorer  234 
Anderson,  Rasmus  B.  150 
Andree,  Richard  119,  151,  309 
Andrews,  Elisha  B.  153 


Angell,  Israel  273 

Antiquarian  Hoax  104 

Antiquitates  Americanae  16,  65,  76, 

91,  95,  98,  99,  101,  114,  126,  171, 

191,  192,  213,  214,  232,  261 
Antiquity    of    inscriptions    302,    311. 

See  also  Difficulty;  Wear. 
Apperception,  Psychology  of  293-300 
Aquidneck  251,  252 
Armenia.    See  Scythians. 
Arnold,   Benedict  99 
Fred  A.  240 
James  N.  132,  235 
Arnold's   Point  Cup  Stone  216-220, 

302,  303 
Arnzen,  Niels  27,  99,  100,  129 
Arrow-sharpening,  alleged  cause  of 

inscriptions  37,  38,  44,  46,   122, 

144,  223 
Ashurst,  Sir  Henry  32 
Assail,  Friedrich  W.  73,  84 
Assawamset  Neck  274 
Assonet  Monument  17,  112.  See  also 

Dighton  Rock. 
Assonet  Neck  17-21,  26,  70,  71,  153, 

186.     See  also   Dighton   Rock; 

Salt  Meadows;  Traditions. 
Astarte  58 
Atlantis  71,  85,   127,   131,   132,   144, 

165.    See  also  Mathieu. 
Atlas,  inscriptions  of  126 
Avery,  Elroy  M.  158 
Aztecs  124,  128 

Babbitt,  John  O.  160 


355 


356 


INDEX 


Babcock,  William  H.  100,  194,  214, 

217 
Bacon,  Edgar  M.  188,  189,  190,  194, 

198 
Francis  300 
Bahman  137,  140 
Baker,  Virginia  257,  273 
Bancroft,  George  101,  103 
Bangor  Commercial  ISO 
Banished  Indians,  a  place-name  20, 

70 
Bannerstone,  inscribed  198,  255-258, 

302,  305,  311 
Bannerstones,  use  of  256,  257 
Barber,  John  W.  129,  150,  151 
Baring-Gould,  Sabine  286 
Barnaby  Cove  21 
Bartlett,  John  R.   87-100,   109,   142, 

ISO,  187,  191,  213,  214,  221,  229- 

232,  235,  255 
Basque  fishermen  269 
Baxter,  James  P.  29,  140,  158,  284 
Baylies,  Francis  28,  Ti,  85 
Samuel  66 
William  55,  63,  65,  66,  67,  68,  73, 

84,  149 
William,  Jr.  66,  149 
Baylies-Smith-West-Gooding-Baylies 

Drawing  65-67,  90,  93,  94n,  96, 

97,  105,  112,  113,  114,  149 
Beamish,  North  L.  103,  150 
Beazley,  C.  R.  174 
Beckwith,  H.  I.  149 
Behinde  Noon,  a  place-name  21 
Belief,  Psychology  of  299,  300 
Belknap,  Jeremy  65,  267 
Bellows  Falls  264-266,  302,  303,  305, 

309,  310,  311 
Benoit,  Peter  269,  270 
Bentley,  William  55 
Berber  language  126 
Berkley,  Anne  11,  38 
George  36-38,  40,  41,  46,  47,  51, 

62,  84,  147,  223,  224 


Berkley,    Mass.      17.      See    Assonet 

Neck. 
Beverly,  Mass.  281,  282 
Biarne  Grimolfson  92,  192 

Heriulfson  92 
Bibliographies  314-351 
Bicknell,  Thomas  W.  193 
Birch  Point,  Maine  267,  302 
Birch,  Thomas  40 
Blackbeard,  Capt.  50 
Blackman,  E.  E.  131 
Blackwell,  I.  A.  103 
Blake,  George  S.  154 
Lucien  I.  158,  164,  167,  173 
Mortimer  153 
Bliss,  Leonard  134 
Block  Island  274 
Boar's  Head,  N.  H.  281 
Bogdani,  William  40 
Boston,  proposal  to  remove  Dighton 

Rock  to  27 
Bradbury,  Beoni  158 
Bradford,  Mass.  282 
Bradford,  R.  I.  206 
Bradford,  William  182n 
Brattleboro,   Vt.     See   West   River. 
Brenton's  Point  220 
Brinton,  Daniel  G.  10,  12,  110,  118, 

121,  122,  259,  309 
Bristol,  R.  I.  17,  187-203 
British  Museum  30,  31,  38,  40,  41, 

42,  147 
Brittain,  Alfred  151 
Broadsides.    See  Mather;  Ober. 
Brooks,  Charles  T.  104 
Brown,    Charles    W.    162,    164,    167, 

242 
Sophie  F.  149 
Brown  University.     See  Jenks 

Museum. 
Bryant,  William  C   153 
Bull,  Ole  27 
Burgess,    George    C.    154,    155,    164, 

167,  296,  298 
George  R.  274,  282 


INDEX 


357 


Buried  Treasure  SO,  63,  70,  141,  263 
Bushnell,  David  I.  41,  147 

Cabot,  John  181 
Mary  R.  265 
William  B.  180 

Cam,  Diogo  175 

Canonicus  12,  180,  250 

Carr,  Charles  R.  256 

Carter,  Henry  W.  282 

Carthaginians.     See   Phoenician 
Theory. 

Cast,  of  Dighton  Rock  56,  158,  330 
(no.    267).      See    also    Impres- 
sions, 
of  Monhegan  Rock  284 

Catlin,  George  109,  120,  123 

Celtic  influences.    See  Druids. 

Chace,  Charles  W.  160 

Chalking  of  characters  of  inscrip- 
tion 43,  51,  66,  88,  143,  153,  156, 
157,  159;  is  inevitably  inac- 
curate 45,  70,  89,  146,  154,  166, 
167,  297,  298 

Chapin,  Alonzo  B.  102 
Howard  M.  6,  198,  237,  250,  251n, 
274 

Chase,  George  H.  214 
Henry  E.  274,  304 

Cherokee  syllabary  11,  197,  258;  used 
on  Mount  Hope  rock  197-202, 
258,  312 

Chia  137,  140 

China  and  Atlantis  71 

Chinese  as  inscribers  49,  55,  72,  85, 
133,  144,  165 

Chingwauk  111,  112,  114-117,  144 

Chippascutt  17,  22 

Christ,  alleged  inscriptions  by  134, 
137-139,  144 

Church,  Benjamin  236 

Ciphers  300 

Clap,  Nathaniel  221,  225 

Clark's  Point,  Maine  267,  302 

Cobb,  David  55 


Cobble  Hill,  Conn.  261,  263 
Coggeshall's  Point,  R.  I.  206 
Cole,  J.  R.  240 
Sarah  240 
William  40 
Cole's  Station,  R.  I.  239,  242,  252 
Colonial    Society    of    Massachusetts 

2,  6,  146 
Conclusions    302-312 
Confucius  140 
Congo  River  172 
Connecticut.     See  Groton,  Pinnacle, 

Scaticook. 
Connecticut    Valley,    Vermont    264- 

266,  302,  303,  305,  309,  310,  311 
Conspiracy  Island  21 
Constellations  on  Dighton  Rock  145. 

See  also  Dammartin. 
Corbitant  180 
Cornwallis,   Charles  61 
Cortereal,  Caspar  169,  175,  269 
Joam  Vaz  175 
Miguel  144,  145,  169-181,  182,  183, 

184,  186,  253,  269,  298,  299,  311, 

315 
Court.     See  Gebelin. 
Crane,  Joshua  E.  160 
Cranston,  William  H.  318  (no.  19) 
Crockett,  W.  H.  265 

Crosby, 160 

Cross,  symbolism  of  58,  219 
Cupstoncs     217-219.  See     also   Ar- 
nold's Point;  Purgatory. 

Da  Gama,  Vasco  175 

Dagon  54 

Daguerreotype,   1840  152.     See  also 

Eastman. 
Damariscotta  283 
Damaris  Cove  Island  282,  283 
Dammartin,    Moreau    de    74,    76-83, 

85,  98,  144,  148,  287,  292,  296 
Danforth,  John  20,  29-33,  35,  37,  39, 

40,  41,  42,  43,  45,  46,  47,  54,  55, 


358 


INDEX 


62,  70,  84,  85,  144,  146,  176,  178, 
179,  180,  184,  201 
Samuel  29,  30,  32,  35,  47,  258 
Thomas  55 
Dansk  Kunstblad  150 
Davenport,  F.  G.  318  (no.  17) 
Davis,  Asahel  102,  291 
Edwin  H.  104,  109 
Frank  S.  159 
John  71,  84,  144 
Nathan  S.  155,  156,  157 
Davol,  Ralph  160,  275 
Dean,  Louis  B.  158 
Deane,  William  E.  C.  157,  158 
De  Costa,  Benjamin  F.  285 
Decrfield,  Mass.  267 
Deer  Island,  Maine  284 
Dclabarre,  Dorothea  C.  6 
Delaware  Indians  278,  304 
Denison,  Fred  260,  302 
De  Roo,  P.  129 
Devil  134,  141,  144,  284 
Devil's  Footprints  221,  222,  273 
Devil's  Rock  280 
Diaz,   Bartholomew   175 
Difficulty  in  deciphering  inscriptions 
25,  43,  46,  47,  55,  64,  89,  125, 
165,  166,  172,  242,  249,  271,  296, 
308.    See  also  Diversity;  Wear. 
Dighton,  Mass.  17,  160 
Dighton  Headstone  258,  302,  305 
Dighton   Rock    12,    15,    17-186,   187, 
196,  197,  205,  206,  214,  221,  223, 
224,  228,  229,  232,  233,  236,  237, 
239,  252,  253,  263,  267,  269,  280, 
283,  284,  293,  296-300,  302-347 
Dighton  Rock,  description  of   17-26 
ownership  of  26 
projects  of  removal  of  27,  73,  99, 

156 
history  of  theories  of  28-145 
reproductions  of  146-164 
conclusions     concerning     165-186, 

302-312 
bibliography  of  315-347 


Diman,  Jeremiah  L.  191-196 

Diodorus  57 

Discovery  of  America.  See  Pre- 
Columbian. 

Diversity  in  depictions  of  inscrip- 
tion 25,  26,  33,  166,  296,  297 

Dominus,  significance  of  41,  42; 
mistakenly  transcribed  32,  41 

Doringh,  Charles  H.  R.  196 

Douglass,  William  50,  84,  288,  292 

Dow,  George  F.  279 

Drake,  Francis  S.  153,  158 
Samuel  A.  140,  150,  284 

Dramatic  appeal  4,  286,  287.  See 
also  Poetry;  Psychology. 

Drawings.    See  Reproductions. 

Drisko,  George  W.  269 

Drouillette,  Father  307 

Druids  as  inscribcrs  72,  132,  144, 
165,  218,  235 

Dublin  Review  127 

Dubuque,  Hugo  A.  195 

Duxbury,  Mass.  272 

Eagle  Neck,  Long  Island  259 

Fames,  John  39,  40,  47,  50 

Earle,  Alice  M.  250n 

Eastman,  Seth  113,  152,  153,  166, 
169,  170,  173 

Eddy,  William  P.  162 

Egyptians  as  inscribers  74,  76-82, 
85,  103,  126,  127,  128,  135,  136, 
139,  144,  145,  165 

Ellis,  George  W.  21,  236 

Engle,  A.  171 

English  Review  37,  62,  288 

English  sailors  70,  140,  144 

Eric  the  Red  92,  281 

Erosion.    See  Wear. 

Erroneous  reports.    See  Mistakes. 

Erroneous  statements  about  en- 
croachment of  river  63;  about 
ignorance  of  Indians  and  obser- 
vation by  early  settlers  28,  29, 


INDEX 


359 


43,  47,  108,  121,  178,   190,  195, 
196 

Ethiopic  inscription  279 

European  influence  on  origin  of 
New  England  petroglyphs  11, 
12,  110,  122,  184,  185,  186,  250, 
253,  254,  258,  260,  270,  302-307 
310-312. 

Everett,  Alexander  H.  101,  102 
Edward  12,  85,  101,  140 

Ewbank,  Thomas  117 

Example  of  whites.     See  European 

Exeter,  R.  I.  274 

Exfoliation.    See  Scaled  areas. 

Explorers,  early,  and  Dighton  Rock 
85,  140,  144.    .S"^^  also  Cortereal. 

Fales,  Ernest  106,  192 

Fall  River  Skeleton  5,  11,  86,  99, 
109,  140 

Falsehood  142 

Farmington,  Maine  282 

Fernald,  Charles  A.  134-140,  144, 
150,  161,  282,  287,  291,  292,  293, 
300 

Fewkes,  J.  W.  309 

Fezzan,  inscriptions  of  126 

Finch,  John  72,  84,  132,  235 

Fisher,  Molly  264 
Nathaniel  43,  147 

Fishermen  on  New  England  coast 
before  1600  181,  182,  269 

Fiske,  John  109 

Flamsteed,  John  78,  82 

Flashlight  photograph.  See  Photo- 
graph. 

Fogland  Ferry  215,  302 

Fogland  Point,  R.  I.  215,  226 

Follansbee, 280 

Folsom,  Augustine  H.  154,  155 
George  101 

Ford,  Worthington  6 

Fraud  103,  142,  225,  271-285,  303 

Free,  E.  E.  153,  315 

French,  William  B.  158 

Freydisa  92,  93 


Friedrichsthal,  Emanuel  152 
Furnius,  Caius  137,  138 

Graecianus  138 

Marcus  Agrippa  Lucius  137-140 

Gaflfarel,  Paul  151 

Galvam, 175 

Ganong,  Frank  N.  162 

William  F.  284,  306,  307 
Gardner, ,  of  Dighton  255 

,  of  Swansea,  255 

Job  71,  74,  137,  150 

William  B.   155-157 
Gardner's  Point  Rock  255,  271,  302 
Gazetteers  71 

Gebelin,  Antoine  Court  de  15,  55-62, 
72,  74,  n,  83,  84,  85,  98,   117, 
129,  144,  148,  287,  292 
Geographical  Journal  172 
Gesture  Language  10,  118,  123 
Gilbert    Museum,    Amherst    College 

155,  158,  266 
Gooding,  Joseph  66,  67,  149 
Goodrich,  S.  G.  152 
Goodwin,  John  A.  304 

Mr.,  mistake  for  Gooding  65,  149 
Gookin,  Daniel  11 
Gordon,  George  B.  257 
Grassy  Island  19,  63 
Grave  Creek  tablet  111 
Gravier,  Gabriel  105,  106,  130,  144, 

151 
Greeks,  ancient  127,  128 
Green,  Samuel  A.  214,  227,  232,  233, 

236 
Greene,  Albert  G.  87,  88 

John  239,  251 

John  W.  248 

Mary  A.  239 

Moses  240 

Philip  248 

Robert  W.  248 

Thomas  L.  248 
Greenwood,  Isaac  20,  24,  29,  30-32, 


360 


INDEX 


36,  37-47,  49,  50-52,  54,  84,  85, 

96,  146,  147,  178,  305 
Grinnell,  Carlton  161 
Groton,  Conn.  264 
Gudrida  92,  94,  106,  145 
Guess,  George  197n 
Guillot,  Paul  103,  151 

Hackh,  I.  W.  D.  9 
Haebler,  Conrad  171 
Haiti,  Phoenician  voyages  to  130 
Hale,  Charles  R.  154 
Edward  E.  151 
Horatio  148 
Haley.     See  Healey 
Hall,  Benjamin  H.  265,  266,  267 
Ham,    his    name   on    Dighton    Rock 

136,    138 
Hamlin,  Augustus  C.  266,  284 
Hammond  Tablet  275-279,  303 
Hampton,  N.  H.  281,  282 
Handbook  of  American  Indians  159, 

218,  219 
Harper's    Encyclopaedia    of    United 

States  History  158,  194 
Harris,  Samuel  68,  69,  83,  85,  144, 

149,  292 
Thaddeus  M.  84 
Harrison,  Alexander  M.  18,  156-158 
Harrisse,  Henry  171,  174,  181 
Hart,  Henry  W.  71  n 
Harvard  College  38,  42,  50,  55,  63, 

68,  156,  157.    See  also  Peabody 

Museum. 
Hatch,  Barnabas  262 
Hathaway,  Charles  A.,  Jr.  161,  164, 

167,  298 
Haven,  Samuel  F.  151 
Hay,  John  106 
Hazard,  Ebenezer  65,  84 
Headstones,    Indian    258,    274,    302, 

305 
Healey,  Walter  67 
Hebrew   writings   on   the   rocks   69, 

84,  85,  109,  144,  264 


Henry  the  Navigator  174 
Henshaw,  Henry  W.  117,  121,  122, 

123,  124,  270,  309 
Hermes,  Karl  H.  103,  150 
Hieroglyphs,  origin  of  9,  10 
Higginson,    Thomas    W.    101,    108, 

158,  193 
High  Hill,  R.  I.  226,  231,  236,  273 
Hill,  Ira  74-76,  83,  85,  98,  117,  144, 

150,  287,  291 
Hindoos  128 
Historical    Society   of    Pennsylvania 

152,  153 
Hitchcock,  Edward  158 
Hog  Island,  Maine  267,  302 
Holland,  William  J.  119,  121,  309 
Hollis,  Timothy  SO,  55,  56 
Holmberg,  Axel  E.  151 
Holmes,  Abiel  84 

William   H.   120,   123,   159,   223 
Hop.     See  Vinland. 
Horse,  symbol  of  Carthage  58 
Horsford,  Eben  N.  150 
Hosmer,  George  L.  284 
Hough,  Clara  S.  315 
Howe,  Mark  A.  DeW.  193 
Howland's  Ferry  273 
Hudson,  John  54 

Humboldt,  Alexander  von  60,  71,  84 
Hutcheson,  David  217 

Ideographic  writing,  origin  of  9, 
10;  use  of,  by  Indians  256,  257, 
258.  See  also  Micmac;  Wam- 
panoag. 

Illegibility  of  inscriptions.  See  Diffi- 
culty. 

Imagination.     See  Psychology. 

Imitation  of  Whites.    See  European. 

Impressions  on  paper,  by  ink,  paint 
or  rubbing  52,  54,  63,  64,  261 

In,  Prince  of  Atlantis  71,  85,  144 

Inadequacies  of  previous  investiga- 
tions 13,  16,  47 

Indian  Captives  21 


INDEX 


361 


cornhills  20 

headstones  258,  274,  302,  305 

pictographs.     See  Pictographs. 

signatures  71,  84,  197,  246,  247, 
249,  250-252,  254 

use  of  Assonet  Neck  18-20 

writing  10,  11 
Indians,    early    beliefs    as    to    their 
origin  49,  61,  62,  72,  74,  84 

antiquity  of,  in  New  England  19n 

character  of  175,  287 

derivation  of  Wampanoag  names 
of  180 

lack  of  traditions  in  New  Eng- 
land 304.     See  also  Traditions. 

their  alleged  ignorance  of  these 
rocks.     See  Erroneous. 

their  interpretations  of  picto- 
graphs   unreliable    67,    70,    117, 

269,  270 

made  rock-records  in  Colonial 
times  46,  305 

their  writings  and  inscriptions 
due  to  white  influence  184,  185, 
197,  302-307.  See  also  Chero- 
kee ;  Conclusions ;  European ; 
Ideographic ;  Micmac ;  Picto- 
graphs; Wampanoag. 

inscription  on  Dighton  Rock  at- 
tributed to  them  32,  44,  46,  49, 
55,  56,  57,  62,  65,  70,  71,  72,,  84, 
100,  101,  103,  104,  108-125,  131, 
144,  151,  153,  169-186,  302,  312 

other  rock-records  due  to  them 
194,  201-203,  214,  217,  219,  223, 
232,  236,  249-254,  259,  260-270, 
281,  302-312 

arguments  against  them  as  in- 
scribers  44,  45,  84,  85,  108,  121 

their  motives ;  interpretation  of 
their  records  44,  68,  71,  84,  110, 
118,  119,  120,  122,  123,  124,  185, 
186,  215,  219,  236,  246,  247,  250, 
253,  254,  259,  263,  265,  267,  269, 

270,  308-312 


Indios,  King  of  Atlantis  71 
Initials   and   names   on   rocks.     See 

White  Men, 
Insane  man  as  rock-inscriber  280 
Inscribed   Rocks.     See   Petroglyphs. 
Interest    in    Dighton    Rock,    extent 

and  continuity  of  165,  315,  316 
Irish  128 

Irving,  Washington  101,  103 
Isis  58,  118 

Island  of  Rhode  Island  205-225 
Israel,    Lost   Tribes   of   46,   49,   84, 

128,  144,  165 

James,  William  288 

Japanese  as  inscribers  49,  55,  85,  144 

Jenks    Museum,    Brown    University 

260 
Jewish  Miners  264 
Jews  and  Tyrians  74-76,  85,  144 
Jomard,  Edme  F.  126 
Jones,   Benjamin    (d.   1720)    30,  31, 
32,  35,  36 
Benjamin  (d.  1768)  32,  36,  38,  39 

Karlsefne.    See  Thorfinn. 

Kendall,  Edward  A.  20,  50,  55,  64, 
69-71,  7Z,  84,  85,  90,  96,  104, 
140,  141,  144,  149,  150,  154,  166, 
176-180,  183,  220,  229,  261,  263, 
264,  265,  267,  279,  297,  308 

Kent,  Conn.    261,  263,  264 

Kichua  language  129 

Kickamuit  River  187,  256,  257 

Kidd,  Capt.  50 

Kinaesthetic  Sense.     See  Muscular. 

King,  Eugene  P.  223,  224 
H.  Irving  252 

King    Philip.     See    Metacomet ; 
Philip. 

King  Philip's  Path,  Duxbury  272 

King  Philip's  War  21,  26,  186,  197, 
236,  253,  305 

King's  Rocks,  R.  I.  224,  302 


362 


INDEX 


Kittredge,  George  L.  6 
Kohl,  J.  G.  181 

La  Croze,  Mathurin  V.  de  45 

Lafayette,  Marquis  de  273 

Laing,    Samuel    103,    140,    142,    149. 

150 
Lakeville,  Mass.  274 
Lang,  Andrew  219 
Lanier,  Sidney  106 
Larsen,  Sophus  175 
Lathrop,  John  65 
Latin   inscription   on   Dighton   Rock 

172 
Le  Clercq  306 
Ledwich,  Edward  292 
Legends.    Sec  Devil ;  Traditions. 
Legibility  of  inscriptions.     See  Dif- 
ficulty. 
Lcif  Erikson  92,  107,  234,  235.    See 

also  Lief. 
Lelewel,  Joachim  150 
Lenape  Stone  275,  278 
Lenni  Lenape  278 
Letters,    Colonial,    time    of    passage 

40;  postal  rates  41 
Libyan  theory  126,  144,  165 
Liefs  Rock  191 
Lincoln,  Nebraska,  131 
Little  Deer  Isle,  Maine  284 
Livcrmorc,  S.  T.  274 
Livrc  des  Sauvages  272 

Lockwood,  158 

Stephen  A.  248 
Loeffler,  Ernst  158 
Longfellow,  Henry  W.  99,  106 
Long   Island   Tablet   259,   302,   305, 

311 
Lord,  Avery  E.  315 

Loring,  280 

Lort,  Michael  15,  28,  29,  38,  40,  56, 

60,  61,  62,  84,  95,  147,  148 
Lossing,   Benson  J.   127,   150 
Lost  Tribes.    See  Israel. 


Low,  A.  248 

S.  248 
Lowell,  James  R,  104,  144 
Lownes,  Albert  E.  68 
Lundy,  John  P.  133,  144,  292,  300 

MacDonald,  William  160 

Machias,  Maine  267-270,  302-304, 
305,  309-312 

Madoc,  Prince  85,  144 

Magnusen,  Finn  67,  93-95,  96,  97, 
98,  105,  106,  113,  116,  117,  130, 
144,  233-235,  287,  292 

Mails,  Colonial.     See  Letters. 

Maine,  inscriptions  in  140.  Sec  Ab- 
naki,  Baxter,  Damaris  Cove, 
Deer  Island,  Farmington,  Ga- 
nong,  Machias,  Monhegan,  Se- 
bago. 

Maine  Historical  Society  129 

Maker  Farm,  Swansea,  Mass.  273 

Mallery,  Garrick  111,  117,  119,  120, 
121,  122,  123,  147-151,  153,  219, 
267-269,  285,  306,  307,  309 

Mammoth  278 

Marbois,  Francois  Marquis  de  68, 
84,  309 

Marget  274 

Mark  Rock,  Warwick,  R.  I.  200, 
237-254,  302,  304,  309,  310 

Massachusetts.  See  Assonet  Neck, 
Beverly,  Dighton  Headstone, 
Dighton  Rock,  Lakeville,  Nan- 
tasket.  New  Bedford,  Rutland, 
Sandwich,  Swansea,  Taunton 
Tablet,  West  Newbury,  West 
Wrentham. 

Massachusetts  Historical  Society 
35,  53,  66,  101,  147-149,  152,  153, 
155 

Massasoit  180,  304;  descendants  of 
201,  202 

Mather,  Cotton,  his  drawings  and 
descriptions  15,  17,  31,  32-36,  37, 


INDEX 


363 


38,  39,  46,  47,  SO,  51,  54,  84,  96, 
134,  144,  147,  292 
copied  from  Danforth  33,  47,  147 
part   of   his   drawing  printed  up- 
side-down 34,  47,  54,  147 
his  Broadside  35,  47,  51,  147 
Mathieu,  Charles  L.  71,  83,  85,  129, 

131,  144,  292 

Mattapoisett  Neck.  See  Gardner's 
Point. 

Matthews,  Albert  6,  42 

Maya  writing  10,  124 

McClennan,  E.  250n 

McCory  Farm,  R.  I.  215 

McLean,  John  P.  153 

Meaning  of  Indian  glyphs.  See  In- 
dians, their  motives. 

Melville,  David  99 

Melville  Station,  R.  I.  205 

Mental  Types  287-293 

Mercer,  H.  C.  278n 

Merrill,  William  279,  280 

Merrimack  Valley  279 

Metacomet,  his  name  on  Mount 
Hope  rock  201-203,  312 

Metcalf,  Stephen  O.  274 

Miantonomi  247,  251,  252,  274 

Micmac  ideographs  11,  197,  306,  307 

Middleboro,  Mass.  274 

Middletown,  R.  I.  221-225 

Militia,  Colonial  250 

Miller,  William  J.  188-194,  196,  198 

Minerva  58 

Missionaries,  Catholic  and  Moravian 

132,  165,  263,  306,  307 
Mistakes.      See    Erroneous,    False- 
hood,   Fraud,    Natural,    Rumor, 
Unintentional. 

Mitchell,  Charlotte  202 

Thomas  C.  202,  312 
Mnemonic   devices   10,    11,    12,   123, 

124,  260,  306,  310 
Mohawk  Indians  70,  84,  85,  117,  144 
Mohegan  Indians  21 
Monanis  Island,  Maine  284 


Mong  115,  116,  145 

Mongolian  writing  133 

Monhegan  Island,  Maine  129,  138, 
284,  285 

Moorehead,  Warren  K.  257 

Moravian  missionaries  263 

Moreau.    See  Dammartin. 

Morse,  Jedediah  279 

Motives  for  inscribing.  See  In- 
dians. 

Moulton,  Joseph  W.  72,  84,  85,  127, 
144 

Moultonboro,  N.  H.  267 

Mount  Hope,  Bristol,  R.  I.  17,  72, 
92,  93,  102,  187-203,  224,  236, 
257,  258,  303,  304,  306,  308,  309, 
310,  312 

Mr.,  significance  of  42 

Munro,  Wilfred  H.   188-193,   198 

Muscular  adjustment  and  mental 
types   289-293 

Muscular  influences  on  perception 
294,  295 

Museum  of  the  American  Indian 
256,  259 

N-rays  295 

Names  and  initials  on  rocks.  See 
Indian  signatures ;  Totems ; 
White  Men,  their  names. 

Nantasket,  Mass.  280 

Narragansett     Bay,    alleged    Norse 
visits  to  86,  100.    See  Norse. 
inscribed  rocks  near  88,  184,  187- 
260,  271-279,  302-312 

Narragansett  Indians  21,  116,  132, 
180 

Narragansett  region,  seat  of  Druids 
132 

Nason,  Elias  152 

Natural  agencies,  mistaken  as  cause 
of  inscriptions  37,  38,  44,  46, 
49,  50,  84,  103,  142,  144,  235; 
actual  cause  of  some  marks  re- 
garded as  inscriptions  221,  224, 


364 


INDEX 


225,  263,  271,  273,  274,  279,  280, 
281,  283,  284,  285,  303 

Neal,  Daniel  36 

Nebraska  Academy  of   Science   131 

Negus,  John  A.   160 

Neptune  59,  145 

Neukomm,  Edmond  151 

New  Bedford  222,  280 

Newbury.     See  West  Newbury. 

New  Hampshire,  inscribed  trees  in 
267,  302,  305.  See  also  Hamp- 
ton. 

New  Jersey.     See  Pemberton. 

New  Milford,  Conn.  263 

Newport,  inscribed  rocks  rumored 
near  220-225,  302 

Newport  Stone  Windmill  86,  99, 
103,  138,  140,  195 

New  Preston,  Conn.  264 

New  York  Historical  Society  111, 
112 

New  York  Times  315 

Noah  136,  138 

Nonquit  Pond,  R.  I.  226 

Norse  Theory  67,  73,  85-109,  111- 
113,  128,  129,  137,  141,  144,  145, 
151,  156,  158,  165,  174,  192-196, 
233-235,  252,  273,  275,  281,  282, 
284,  315 

Northman's  Written  Rock,  West 
Newbury  107,  279-282 

Northmen's  Rock,  Mount  Hope  191 

Norumbega  281 

Notarikon  300 

Ober,  Andrew  K.  281,  282 
Observation,  Psychology  of  293-299 
Occupessuatuxet  239,  251 
Old    Colony    Historical    Society   27, 

154,  158,  160,  258,  282 
Onffroy.     See  Thoron. 
Ophir  129 

Ordronaux,  John  142 
Orient,  Long  Island  259 
Oriental      characters     on      Dighton 


Rock  44,  46,  49,  55,  65,  68,  85. 

See    also    Hebrew;    Phoenician. 
Ossamequin  180 
Ownership  of  Dighton  Rock  26,  27 

Paddack,  Elisha  54,  63,  85,  148 

Paradise   Rocks,  near   Newport  223 

Passamaquoddy  Indians  269,  306 

Patapsico  202 

Patch,  Nathan  281 

Peabody  Museum,  Harvard  Uni- 
versity 69,  148,  149 

Peirce,  Ebenezer  W.  20 

Pelasgian  74 

Pemberton  Axe  198,  257 

Penobscot  Indians,  at  Cambridge  and 
Warren  201,  202;  at  Machias 
269 ;   their  pictographs  306 

Peoria  Public  Library  158 

Pequot  Indians  116 

Perception,  Psychology  of  293-299 

Percy,  Thomas  62 

Perry,  Christopher  221 

Persians  as  inscribers  74,  85,  128, 
144 

Petroglyphs  of  New  England,  gen- 
eral discussion  12,  302-312;  see 
Pictographs. 

Petroglyphs  outside  New  England 
110,   118-121,   131,  303,  309 

Philip,  King  103,  179,  202,  203,  250, 
257,  258,  280,  284,  312 

Philosophical  Transactions  34,  147 

Phoenician  theory,  49-85,  103,  109, 
126-131,  137,  144,  145,  165,  233, 
260,  263 

Photograph,  Flashlight  146,  154, 
162-164,  167,  308 

Photographs.     See  Reproductions. 

Pictographs  of  New  England,  de- 
scriptions of  166,  168,  184,  185, 
215,  227,  228,  236,  243-254,  258, 
259,  264-267,  267-270,  275-279, 
281,  284,  308-312 

Pictographs,  interpretation  of.     See 


INDEX 


365 


Indians :     their     interpretation ; 
their  motives. 

Pictography,  use  of,  by  Indians  11, 
109,  110,  117,  118,  303-309 

Picture-writing,  origin  of  9 

Pidgeon,  William  128 

Pighoo  lis 

Pilling,  J.  C.  198n 

Pining,    Scandinavian  navigator   175 

Pinnacle,  The,  Conn.  264 

Pintard,  John  65 

Piowant   19 

Pirates  50,  70,  85,  141,  144,  165 

Plymouth  Colony,  seizes  Assonet 
Neck  19,  26;  its  trading  posts 
28,  269,  270,  305 

Pocasset  Swamp  Fight  21 

Poetic  appeal  of  the  rock  71,  12, 
97,  106,  107,  193,  203 

Pokanokets.     See  Wampanoags. 

Pool,  George  L.  279,  280,  282 

Poore,  Benjamin  P.  272 

Pope,  Edward  64 

Portsmouth  inscriptions  97,  109, 
205-220,  221,  226,  229,  232,  233- 
236,  302 

Portsmouth  Coal  Mines  216,  220 

Portsmouth  Grove  206,  214 

Portuguese  as  navigators  174,   181 
as  discoverers  of  America  175 
inscription  on  Congo  river  172 
coat   of   arms    173,    181 ;    influ- 
ence on  later  Wampanoags  179 ; 
interest    in    Dighton    Rock    27, 
315.    See  also  Cortereal. 

Postal  rates,  Colonial  41.  See  Let- 
ters. 

Pothorst,  Scandinavian  navigator 
175 

Powell,  John  W.  119 

Pre-Columbian  voyages  12,  175 
Pre-glacial     inscriptions     131,     144, 
165 

Prehistoric  Man,  his  greatest  dis- 
coveries 8 


Priapus  58,  80 

Price's  Cove  221 

Providence  Journal  71n,  160,  274 

Prowse,  D.  W.  181 

Psychological    Observations    14,    15, 

23,  59,  82,  83,  98,  117,  123,  135, 

194,  195,  196,  200,  218,  271,  286- 

301,  308,  310,  311 
Punic.    See  Phcenician. 
Punkatace,  R.  I.    229 
Purgatory  rocks,  near  Newport  38, 

46,  221-224,  272,  302 
Putnam,  F.  W.  281 
Putnam's  Magazine  195 

Quadequina  180 

Rafn,  Charles  C.  16,  28,  29,  71,  73, 
86-106,  111,  112,  114,  130,  132, 
144,  147-150,  157,  169.  171,  191, 
192,  195,  213,  224,  229,  233-235, 
255,  279,  315 

Rau,  Charles  100 

Realism,  Psychology  of  293 

Rebus  stage  of  writing  9,  10 

Removal  of  Dighton  Rock,  proposed 
27,  73,  99,  156 

Remusat,  Jean  P.  A.  72,  84 

Reproductions  of  Dighton  Rock  in- 
scription  143,   146-164 

Rhode  Island,  inscriptions  in.  See 
Arnold's  Point,  Bannerstone, 
Block  Island,  Denison  Tablet, 
Exeter,  King's  Rocks,  Mark 
Rock,  Middletown,  Mount  Hope, 
Newport,  Portsmouth,  Slocum 
Farm,  Tiverton,  Windmill  Hill. 

Rhode  Island  Citizen's  Historical 
Society  191 

Rhode  Island  Historical  Society  27, 
73,  86-91,  149,  150,  155,  156,  187, 
191,  213,  221,  232,  239,  260,  274; 
its  drawing  86-91,  95-97,  105, 
150;  Rafn's  altered  reproduc- 
tion 89-91,  150 


366 


INDEX 


Rhode  Island,  Island  of  205-225 
Richmond,  William  E.  72,  85,   106 

197 
Ricketson,  Daniel  106 
Rider,  Sidney  S.  274 
Riverdale,  R.  I.  240 
Roman  Catholic  inscription  132,  144 

165 
Romance.     See  Dramatic;  Poetic. 
Romans  at  Dighton  Rock  128,  134- 

140,  144,  165 
Roux  de  Rochelle  Jean  B.  G.  149 
Royal  Library,  Copenhagen  89,   150 
Royal    Society,   London    15,   30,   Z2, 

34,  38,  39,  40,  42,  147 
Royal     Society    of     Northern     An 

tiquaries  27,  99 
Ruge,  Sophus  317   (no.  13) 
Rumor  220,  225,  271-285,  303 
Runic  characters  in  the  inscriptions 

93,  94,  96,  97,  105,  106,  111,  128, 

156,  195,  221,  234,  235,  275,  282, 

284.    See  also  Norse  theory. 
Rutland,  Mass.  279 

Sachuest  Beach  222,  224,  225 

Sachuest  Point  224,  272 

Sakonnet  River  226 

Salt  Meadows,  early  source  of  hay 
19,  28,  183 

Sandwich,  Mass.  280 

Sandy  River,  Maine  282 

Sassan  136,  140 

Saville,  Foster  H.  256 

Scaled  areas  on  rocks,  marks  visi- 
ble in  200,  242,  245-247 

Scandinavian  Memorial  Club  27 

Scaticook,  Conn.     260-264,  302,  303 

Schoolcraft,  Henry  R.  102,  110-117, 
120,  129,  140,  149-152,  265,  266, 
271,  272,  306 

Scythians  62,  67,  72,  84,  144,  165 

Seager,  Edward  154,  166,  297 

Sea-green  Flag  of  Dighton  Rock 
138,  139 


Seaver,  James  E.  6,  160,  258 
Sebago  Lake,  Maine  282 
September  Gale  of  1815  22,  227 
Sequoyah  197 
Sewall,  Rufus  K.  129 
Samuel  35,  47 

Stephen  55-57,  68,  72,  77,  84,  85. 
148 
Shadow-lighting.      See    Photograph, 

Flashlight. 
Shakespeare,  William  135,  300 
Shang  Ti  133,  134 
Shawomet  251 
Shoreward  slope  of   Dighton   Rock 

24,  137,  160,  161 
Shove,  Asa  183n 
Edward  51,  52 
George  153 

George  A.  118,  153,  158 
Siberia,  inscriptions  in  62 
Signatures.     See  Indian. 
Skeleton  in  armor.    See  Fall  River. 
Simitiere,  Pierre  E.  du  36,  37,  54, 

84,  223,  224 
Sinding,  Paul  C.  97,  106 

Skiff,  280 

Skrellings  93,  95,  97,  106 

Slab,  near  Dighton  Rock  22,  51,  70 

Slade,  Elisha  158 

William  A.  158,  193 
Slafter,  E.  F.  317  (no.  13) 
Sloane,  Sir  Hans  40 
Slocum  Farm,  R.  I.  274 
Slosson,  Barzillai  263 
Smibert,  John  36,  2,7,  A7,  84,  147 

Williams  36 
Smith,  Buckingham  132,  144,  300 
John  64,  65-67,  84,  149 
Joshua  T.  102 
Smith's  Cove  17,  19 
Snorre,  son  of  Thorfinn  93,  95,  97, 

105,  130,  145 
Snorre  Thorbrandson  92,  105 
Society   of    Antiquaries   of    London 
30,  38,  40,  41,  62,  147 


INDEX 


367 


Socononoco  251,  252 
Solomon,  King  74,  129 
South  Kingstown,  R.  I.  274 

Spooncr,  264 

Spring,  mentioned  on  Dighton  Rock 

182-184,  312.     See  also  White 

Spring. 
Spring  Green  Farm,  R.  I.  240 
Squier,   Ephraim   G.    104,    109,    110, 

120,  121,  123,  140,  305 
Stark,  John  72,  85 
Stephens,  George  133 
Stereoscopic  photographs  155-157 
Sterne,  Laurence  295 
Stiles,  Ezra  24,  36,  46,  50-54,  60-63, 

65,  66,  84,  85,  104,  148,  149,  187, 

191-197,  206-216,  220,  221,  228, 

229,  222,,  22S-227,  239-242,  260- 

264,  280,  284,  308 
Stone  Bridge,  Tiverton  226,  273 
Stone,  G.  H.  285 

Storehouse  Point,  Taunton  River  28 
Strahlenburg,  Philip  J.  62 
Submersion,  inscribed  rocks  subject 

to  190,  308 
Summaries  47,  84-85,   143-145,   165, 

302 
Swansea,  Mass.    222.    See  Gardner's 

Point;  Maker  Farm. 
Syllabaries,  origin  of  9 
Syllabary,     Cherokee     11,     197-202, 

258,  312 
Sylvester,  Herbert  M.  129 
Sylvia,  71n 

Tablets.        See      Denison ;      Grave 

Creek;  Long  Island;  Taunton; 

Tennessee. 
Tartars  49,  62,  84,  144 
Taunton,  Mass.  17 
Taunton  Copper  Company  220 
Taunton  haymakers  as  inscribers  19, 

28,  183,  184,  186,  312 
Taunton    Proprietors    and    Assonet 

Neck  19 


Taunton  River   17 

Taunton  Tablet  275-279,  303 

Taunton  Whig  127 

Taylor,  H.  R.  267,  269 

Telesphore  58 

Tennessee  Tablet   198,  258 

Thachcr,  name  on  Dighton  Rock  181, 
182,  186,  312 

Thomas,  Cyrus  117,  120,  159,  258 

Thorfinn  Karlsefne  16,  85,  90,  92-98. 
105,  106,  111,  113,  144,  145.  169, 
192,  235 

Thorhall  92,  94,  96,  105 

Thorhall  Gamlason  92 

Thoron,  Don  Enrique  Onffroy  de 
128-131,  144,  151,  287,  292 

Thorstein  92 

Thorwald  92,  97,  281 

Thorward  92 

Three  Mile  River  275 

Tilden,  Louis  W.  280 

Tisdale,  H.  318  (no.  19) 

Tiverton,  R.  I.  97,  109,  142,  215, 
226-236,  250,  254,  271-273,  302, 
304 

Totems  109,  117,  123,  124 

Trading  Posts  28,  269,  270,  305 

Tradition,  growth  of  195,  196 

Traditions  relative  to  Assonet  Neck 
20,  30,  31,  43,  45,  70,  140,  141, 
176,  177,  179;  relative  to  Mount 
Hope  191,  193,  195,  196 

Treasure-hunters.  See  Buried  Treas- 
ure. 

Trees,  inscribed  267,  302,  305 

Trojans  49,  74,  85,  144 

Trumbull,  James  H.  201 

Tsendal  language  130 

Tucker,  Charles  R.  161 

Tuspaquin  180 

Tuttle,  Julius  H.  6 

Tylor,  Edward  B.  121 

Types,  mental  287-293 

Tyrians  58,  74-76,  85,  127,  144 

Tyrker  234,  235 


368 


INDEX 


Undecipherable,    the    inscriptions    so 

judged  46,  84,  144 
Unintentional     human     agency     as 

cause  of  markings.     See  King's 

Rocks ;  Purgatory ;  Sachuest. 
United  States,  its  destiny  61 
United    States    Naval    Coal    Depot 

205,  215 
Upham,  William  P.  66,  149 
Up-stream  end  of  Dighton  Rock  24, 

51,  127n,  308 

Vallancey,    Charles   60,   62,   84,   95, 

292 
Vermont,  inscriptions  in  70,  264-267, 

302,  303,  305,  309-311 
Verrazano,    Giovanni    de    140,    144, 

169,  174,  176,  203 
Vetromile,  E.  306,  307 
Villa,  or  Villers,  John  40 
Vinland  16,  92,  94,  97,  99,  100,  107, 

112,  235 

Walam   Olum   177,  278 

Waldron,  Edward  F.  158,  161 

Walker,  Hannah  30,  31 
James  26,  30,  31 

Wampanoag  ideographic  system  197, 
257,  258.     See  Bannerstone. 

Wampanoag  Indians  19,  26,  103,  116, 
117,  179,  195,  202,  203,  217,  271, 
304,  312 

Wampum  belts  12 

Wantastiquet   River.     See  West 
River. 

Ward,  Albert  L.  160 

Warden,  David  B.  73,  84,  95,  149 

Warren,  R.  I.  198.  See  Banner- 
stone,  King's  Rocks,  Pcnobscc^ 
Indians,  Windmill  Hill. 

Warwick,  R.  I.  222,  237-254 

Washburn,  Moses  280 

Washington,   Conn.   264 

Washington,  George  65,  84,  135,  137 
Samuel  135 


Waterman,  H.  248 
F.  M.  248 
Mary  A.  248 
Wawaloam  274 

Wear  of  the  rocks,  rapidity  of  23, 
24,  45,  47,  56,  166,  194,  228,  307, 
308 
Weathersfield,  Vt.  267,  302,  305 
Webb,  Thomas  H.  87-100,  108,  109, 
142,  148,  149,  152,  187,  191,  197, 
205,  213,  214,  224,  227,  229-233, 
235,  237,  239,  242,  248,  249,  255, 
261,  272,  279,  292 
Wells,  H.  G.  8 
Weshaganesett  251 
West,  Samuel  55,  63,  66,  149 
Westerly,  R.  I.    See  Denison  Tablet. 
West  Newbury,  Mass.  107,  279-282 
West  River,  Vt.  265,  266,  302,  303, 

305,  309-311 
Westville,  Mass.  275 
West  Wrentham,  Mass.  259,  302 
What  Cheer,  steamboat  240 
Wheat  on,  Henry  103 
Whipple,  John  142,  235,  288 
White   Man's    Brook    176,    178,    183 
White  Men,  influence  of,  on  Indian 

writing.     See   European. 
White  Men,  suggested  as  carvers  of 
the  rocks  85,  101,  102,  140,  141, 
144,  220,  302,  311,  312.    See  also 
Block    Island,    Clap,    Cortereal, 
Farmington,  Insane  man,  Taun- 
ton haymakers,  Thacher. 
White  Men,  their  names  and  initials 
on  the   rocks   23,  24,    144,   161, 
184,  190,  224,  240,  242,  248,  249, 
254,  261,  262,  273,  308 
White  Spring  176,  178,  183,  184 
Whittier,  John  G.  107,  279,  281 
Wilbur,  George  K.  162 
Wilder,  Harris  H.,  6,  20,  259 
Williams,  Roger  11 
Samuel  264 
Seth  55 


INDEX 


369 


Williamson,  H.  D.  269 
Willoughby,  Charles  C.  19,  182,  257, 

278,  281,  282 
Wilson,  Daniel  285 
Windmill  Hill,  R.  I.  273 
Winnepesaukee  River  267 
Winship,  George  P.  6 
Winslow,  Edward  11 
Winsor,    Justin    147-150,    285,    317 

(no.   13) 
Winthrop,  James  63-66,  69,  97,  141, 

149 
John  50,  52,  55,  56,  63,  84,  148 


Wonimenatony  251 
Wootonekanuske  202 
Worsaae,  Jens  J.  A.  100 
Writing,   development   of  8-10 
Writing  of  Indians  10,  11.    See  also 
Indians,  their  writings. 

Yale  College  51,  53,  66,  187 
Yale  University  35,  66,  147,  148 
Yates,  John  V.  N.  144 
Young,  Daniel  A.  259 
George  M.  128,  157,  158 


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